THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

In Louisiana there is very little you can do to keep from running and potentially being elected to public office. The latest first round of voting for Governor proved that yesterday. Senator "Diaper Dave" Vitter will be in the runoff despite all his moral failings, but he barely made it to second place in the voting.

In a race that made a late but convincing case for the enduring entertainment value of Louisiana politics, Senator David Vitter, a Republican, barely squeaked out a second-place finish in Saturday’s primary election for governor to make a runoff against John Bel Edwards, a Democratic state representative.

While Mr. Edwards, with roughly 40 percent of the vote, performed much more strongly than many expected, Mr. Vitter, with around 23 percent, just beat a late surge by one of the other Republicans running in the nonpartisan contest. If no one wins a majority in the primary, as in this case, the top two advance to a runoff, which is set for Nov 21...

The fundamentals still favor Mr. Vitter in the runoff; there is no Democrat left in Louisiana holding statewide office. But with most of the votes counted, Mr. Vitter was trailing Mr. Edwards by nearly 17 percentage points. This underperformance may be due in part to the re-emergence of the 2007 revelations that Mr. Vitter had been involved with prostitutes and to the bizarre developments in the final 48-hour stretch of the primary.

The political world was astonished Friday night when news emerged that a private investigator conducting opposition research for the Vitter campaign was arrested in the New Orleans suburbs. The arrest arose from an almost comical sequence of events beginning at a cafe in Jefferson Parish called the Royal Blend, where a group of older men routinely gather to talk local business. That morning the group included the parish sheriff, Newell Normand; a Republican state senator; a prominent attorney who supports Democratic causes; and a private investigator and former New Orleans police officer.

According to Sheriff Normand, some in the group noticed a man who appeared to be filming their conversation with a small camera. When the man was confronted, he left the cafe and took off through the surrounding backyards. After a brief search, sheriff’s deputies found him hiding behind an air-conditioning unit. He was charged with criminal mischief, a misdemeanor.

As it turns out, the man, Robert J. Frenzel, was employed by a Dallas-based investigative firm that had been hired by the Vitter campaign for opposition research. The sheriff’s office obtained warrants to search Mr. Frenzel’s rental car, but officials noticed through the windshield that he had some research concerning Jason Berry, an investigative blogger who two weeks ago published video interviews with a woman who claimed to have had a multiyear affair with Mr. Vitter when she worked as an escort in New Orleans. The credibility of her account has been challenged in some significant ways, and the Vitter campaign has dismissed it as having “zero legitimacy.”

It had zero legitimacy until Diaper Dave was found snooping on the blogger who exposed his latest "family values" moment, including his former mistress and their love child. Now the voters seem to think they can do quite well without Diaper Dave. I just hope the love child doesn't end up looking like his father.