She’s already vowed to resign if the charges against her are proved true but that won’t help Bauer if he’s bounced in the primary, so here comes the next stage in attacking Haley’s character. This is the same guy, mind you, whom Erick Erickson suspects of being behind Will Folks’s smear campaign and whose own since-fired consultant, Larry Marchant, claimed to have had a one-night stand with Haley, to the great amusement of everyone who’s seen that video of him. Question for Bauer: Will these be his and hers polygraphs? You ready to sit down next to Haley and tell the machine that you haven’t pushed any smears about her to the media?

Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer challenged GOP gubernatorial opponent Nikki Haley today to take a lie-detector test to prove that she didn’t have an affair, as his former campaign consultant claimed…

“Nobody has been a better friend of transparency than Andre Bauer,” Bauer said in a news release. “Ms. Haley, on the other hand, speaks of transparency, but apparently only for other people, not for herself. … Now, we learn that she is refusing to release phone and text messages which could clear up some of the unfortunate recent allegations.”

Bauer also said Haley is “not the person she is pretending to be.”

I take it that last bit is a nod at the new “Haley’s a phony Christian” smear, which of course was also the point of the now infamous “raghead” crack by State Sen. Jake Knotts. In fact, Knotts had a bit more to say about that than was initially reported. Can this story somehow get even worse? My friends, it can:

Knotts says he believed Haley has been set up by a network of Sikhs and was programmed to run for governor of South Carolina by outside influences in foreign countries. He claims she is hiding her religion and he wants the voters to know about it.

“We got a raghead in Washington; we don’t need one in South Carolina,” Knotts said more than once. “She’s a raghead that’s ashamed of her religion trying to hid it behind being Methodist for political reasons.”…

Knotts says he believes Haley’s father has been sending letters to India saying that Haley is the first Sikh running for high office in America. He says her father walks around Lexington wearing a turban.

“We’re at war over there,” Knotts said.

Asked to clarify, he said he did not mean the United States was at war with India, but was at war with “foreign countries.”

So Haley’s family is Indian and we’re fighting Muslim jihadis, and … close enough, I guess? Today Jenny Sanford leveraged some of her moral authority on Haley’s behalf by denouncing the scumbaggery being practiced here, but I fear South Carolina’s a lost cause. My mental picture of the state these days is of a giant sleaze blob laying waste to the land, consuming everyone and everything it touches. Note to Hot Air readers in SC: Get out while you still can.