I don’t know what you call this, but whatever it is, “ethics dunce” just isn’t enough.

That’s Susanna Gibson above with her husband (I don’t know where those annoying stars came from) performing on a porn website while she was already running as a candidate for the Virginia House of Delegates. The 40-year-old Democrat, along with her lawyer husband, have been appearing in flagrante delicto on an X-rated website, and offering to perform sundry sex acts in front of the camera, including those involving violence and bodily excretions, in exchange for money—not that there’s anything wrong with that.

But after the conservative Washington Free Beacon was tipped off to this rare proclivity on the part of a political candidate and wrote about it, Gibson announced that she was shocked—shocked!—that anyone would feel that a candidate for the legislature soliciting money for sex acts was something the public had a right to know about. She found a lawyer willing to try to use Maryland’s “revenge porn” law to punish such people. Daniel P. Watkins of the Meier Watkins Phillips Pusch firm, argues that “it’s illegal and it’s disgusting to disseminate this kind of material”and says that he is “working closely with the F.B.I. and local prosecutors to bring the wrongdoers to justice.”

Sure, Danny, good luck with that! It’s a ridiculous idea for a law suit, but ya never know, so it slips under the wire as “ethical,” though any lawyer bringing such a suit should have to wear a bag on his head.

Ugh. Where to begin?

• A candidate’s private sex life is indeed not fair game for invasion, but when a candidate places her sexual activities on the web, they are no longer private
• The public has to assess a candidate’s judgment and values, and that one thinks selling rough sex and golden showers on line is a responsible activity for someone entrusted with state lawmaking is certainly information an informed voter should have.
•  Gibson’s an idiot. Besides posting the web videos, she doesn’t comprehend the Streisand Effect, which holds that protesting her “exposure” and suing guarantees that her “humiliation” will be far wider that it would have been otherwise.

Proving that she has some kind of crippling cognitive problem further disqualifying her for office, Gibson doubled down. “It won’t intimidate me and it won’t silence me,” she said in a statement. “My political opponents and their Republican allies have proven they’re willing to commit a sex crime to attack me and my family because there’s no line they won’t cross to silence women when they speak up.”

“No line”—like that line where you let voters know about conduct that a candidate posts on the web, to “silence” a woman from broadcasting what she has chosen to broadcast by revealing that she broadcast it.

As I said: she’s an idiot.

She’ll probably get elected.

Of course, this insane episode fits somewhere on the Ethics Alarms “Naked Teacher Principle” spectrum. How can the candidate complain about the adverse consequences when she posted the porn videos online? That alone marks her as too dim, confused and ethically-muddled to be an elected official–and a teacher. (She’s a nurse.)

But Gibson’s also a Democrat, so that means the rapidly deteriorating progressive/Democrat news-distorting operating had to find some way to try to mitigate this scandal. So it wrote,

Releasing damaging information about candidates of the opposing party into the heat of a campaign is an age-old political practice, but the sensational nature of the disclosure of sex tapes — reportedly featuring Ms. Gibson and her husband, a lawyer — is highly unusual.

Huh. I wonder why this hasn’t happened before? It’s a mystery! Might it possibly be that sane and halfway-responsible political candidates never do this?