The one that shocked me most happened eight years ago. I’d been hired by the New Mexico Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee to do oppo on a slate of Republicans in state races. When I ran a court records search on one of them I found a felony case for child abuse.

The case had been dismissed without explanation, but I drove to the courthouse and pulled the file, which said the candidate’s teenage daughter told her school nurse that her father beat her with a belt and repeated the story to the police, who then questioned the father. He admitted it and said it was for her own good—she had talked back to her parents, and sparing the rod spoils the child. He knew that, he said, because he’d been a minister.

The police charged him, but the daughter later recanted and refused to cooperate. The craziest part was that the former minister had been recruited to run specifically as a “family values” conservative. I took the documents to a political reporter at the afternoon daily, who covered the story, and the guy got trounced.