For a guy who is currently languishing well down in the second tier of candidates for the Republican nomination, Marco Rubio certainly punches well above his weight class in terms of negative media attention. Whether it’s his pricey real estate deals (a shared cottage that fetched all of $117K), his “handsome brick driveway” or his luxury fishing, er… dinghy, the media can’t get enough of Rubio’s “scandal” plagued history. And now the Washington Post has finished peering deep into the Senator’s past and discovered yet another shocking tale. He was once a city commissioner in West Miami, shortly after he got out of college.

Why is this big news? Well because he… you see, during some of the meetings he said… okay. I have no idea why this is a story but clearly somebody thinks it’s a huge deal.

From April 1998 until his February 2000 debut in the Florida legislature, Rubio endured hours of monotonous debates about car wash regulations, inadequate bus stop benches, the relative merits of oak vs. black olive trees, and what snacks should be allowed in city park vending machines.

Rarely has a major presidential candidate begun at such a low rung of elective politics. Two years out of the University of Miami’s law school, Rubio was elected with 744 votes, becoming the junior-most member of a five-person city commission in West Miami, a predominantly Cuban and working-class community of about 6,000, not even a square mile long.

And while he was on the commission and had to sit through endless meetings discussing the merits of various types of trees to be planted in a public park, he apparently grew impatient with the slow pace of work among his fellow commissioners.

The meeting at city hall was in its grueling third hour when the fresh-faced 26-year-old newcomer started to lose his cool.

He fidgeted in his seat. He rocked back and forth. He buried his head in his palms before grabbing the microphone in exhaustion.

“Can we do something?” he said. “I don’t care what we do. Let’s do something.”

The Post apparently dug up 63 hours (!) of recorded video of this city commission’s meetings and poured through every last minute of them trying to find something useful to use against Rubio. They even include some of the video for you at the link. I suppose that’s due diligence for a newspaper since he’s a presidential candidate now, but one gets the feeling that they didn’t want to spend that much time investigating and not get a scandal out of it for their trouble.

But what did they deliver? Rubio occasionally became impatient and got into some arguments with other people on the commission. There’s a shocker for you. I’m sure that never happens on any other village councils around the nation, eh? I actually read through the entire thing so don’t feel like you have to do it, but if you’re bored… help yourself. This is a vast, lengthy report which in the end seems to say absolutely nothing of interest. But perhaps there’s something else buried in the video which will emerge later about his luxury yacht. Stay tuned.