Democrats have a long record of helping the GOP electorate choose eventual losers in their primaries, as in 2012, with the terrible candidate Todd Akin, a Missouri congressman at the time. But even when Democrats don’t play such games, the GOP periodically self-destructs, nominating a fringe candidate such as dabbler-in-witchcraft Christine O’Donnell in Delaware in 2010.

This year, all eyes are back on Missouri, where disgraced former governor Eric Greitens is attempting a return to politics via the Senate. As The Post said after he announced his candidacy on March 22, the man who left office in 2018 once faced “two criminal charges, an ethics probe, and public fallout over reports that he’d had an affair with a hairdresser and then allegedly tried to blackmail her with nude photos.” But now “the criminal charges have been dropped, the ethics case has been closed, and Greitens is aiming for a Lazarus-esque comeback.”

After hearing news of the Greitens candidacy in Missouri, a GOP insider told me, “Any Republican not named Greitens wins that seat easily.”

Greitens now says he has been “exonerated,” but as I discovered when I interviewed him last week, he seems to regard “exonerated” as an accordion term that includes not being actually cleared by any legal body or judge. Dropped charges and abandoned investigations are not exoneration.