Counterfeit police badges. A persecuted prosecutor. Employee loyalty oaths. A sleazy foreign government? Nah, just another Christie scandal.

A few years from now, people may think
this is a photograph of Chris Christie
saying farewell to his troops.

There's an old rule of thumb in the pest control business: If you find a cockroach in the kitchen, guaranteed you have more than one cockroach in the kitchen.

And it's starting to turn out that if you have a scandal involving Chris Christie, guaranteed you have....well, maybe the governor's official residence, one of those mansions so pretentious it has a pretentious name – Drumthwacket – needs to be sprayed. 

First there was the George Washington Bridge scandal to screw the mayor of Fort Lee. Then a shutoff of Hurricane Sandy aid to screw the mayor of Hoboken. And now we're beginning to learn about a county prosecutor getting screwed for trying to do his job – which in this case involved prosecuting a Christie cronie.

I found the latest brewing scandal – actually it may be the oldest scandal, suppressed until now – at Crooks and Liars, which in turn lifted its info from the Newark Star-Ledger. Please do drop in  at Crooks and Liars and treat yourself to all the juicy details.

However, for you very busy folks who are pressed at the moment, here's an executive summary lifted from Crooks and Liars (boldfacing my own to enhance your delectation):

And now, we are reminded of the accusations of Ben Barlyn, a former Hunterdon County prosecutor who says he was fired because he refused to drop a case against a Christie ally. For the past year, he’s been striving to prove his story, paying through the nose for a civil lawsuit against the state while telling it to anyone who will listen. 

Barlyn says that after he secured an indictment in 2010 against Hunterdon County Sheriff Deborah Trout, a Republican with political ties to Christie, he was fired and the case hastily killed by Christie’s appointed attorney general at the time, Paula Dow. The real story isn’t the mundane crimes that were alleged: hiring without proper background checks, making employees sign loyalty oaths, threatening critics and producing fake police badges for a prominent Christie donor. It’s the possible abuse of power by the administration’s head prosecutor.

I'm beginning to wonder if the real question about Christie should be not whether he's done as a presidential candidate, but whether he's going to prison.