Is a stalking accusation fair game in Oregon’s U.S. Senate race?

Everybody’s done something stupid during a breakup. But not everyone gets the police called on them. Three times. In two different relationships.

Does that make someone unsuitable for public office? Of course not.

But Democrats in Oregon are doing their darndest to use a minor history of unpleasant domestic interactions against rising Republican star Monica Wehby, a 52-year-old pediatric neurosurgeon who won her May primary and will face Democratic U.S. Sen. Jeff Merkeley in the fall.

In 2007 and 2009, Wehby’s ex-husband, James Grant, an anesthesiologist, filed police reports alleging that Wehby had behaved belligerently. The first incident took place while they were estranged but still living in under the same roof with their four children. Grant told Portland police she hit him in the face with a pad of paper while she was on the phone. Wehby, who told police she’d had “a few drinks” at a Christmas party, said she merely waved him off. In the second incident, he told police she pounded on his door at 10:15 p.m. She wanted to say goodbye to her children because she was going out of town, but they were already asleep. No charges were ever filed.

Then, just before the May primary, Politico unearthed a new incident. Last year, Wehby’s ex-boyfriend, Andrew W. Miller, a timber baron and Republican donor, called 911 to report that she was in his home without his permission and had been stalking him. No charges were filed in that incident either, and Miller, who supports Wehby’s candidacy, told Politico he regrets making the call.

On Monday, my colleague Mark Z. Barabak wrote that the race has become yet another battleground in the national struggle about gender, politics and double standards.

Even though Wehby won the primary, voting patterns showed she was damaged by the unpleasant revelations about her personal life. “Across the country,” Barabak wrote, Republicans have asserted that “Democrats would be outraged if Republicans used a woman’s personal relationships as campaign fodder.”

“Without a doubt, there’s a complete double standard,” Washington consultant Katie Packer Gage told him. (Maybe I missed it, but I don’t remember hearing from Gage when Texas gubernatorial candidate Wendy Davis, a Democrat, was attacked as a bad mother because she left her daughters with her husband intermittently while she attended Harvard Law School.)

“This is the war on women here,” Wehby told radio host Lars Larson at the end of an interview in which he probed the incidents with her ex-husband and ex-boyfriend.

Not exactly.

Maybe it’s a war on a woman. But the “war on women” that Democrats have so successfully used to cudgel the GOP is about policies that diminish women’s rights and well-being. It’s about Republican efforts to prevent women from obtaining legal abortions or contraceptive coverage or higher wages.

Anybody who runs for office has to expect opponents to dig for dirt. (I was once slipped an opposition report with a photo of an inebriated-looking male candidate staring at a woman’s cleavage.) Any reasonably intelligent candidate for high-profile public office will not only anticipate this sort of thing but attempt to defuse it before it becomes an issue.

I’ve read the police reports, heard the 911 call made by Wehby’s ex-boyfriend and listened to Wehby’s interview with Larson, in which she sounds every bit like the even-tempered, “mellow” surgeon she calls herself. “If I decompensated every time there was stress, how would I do my job?” she asked.

Still, Wehby is a little old to be acting like a heartsick teenager, even if Miller sounds like one of those unevolved men who finds emotional cutoff easier than communicating. He did not sound afraid on the police call; he just sounded annoyed.

This campaign offers a life lesson to would-be political candidates: Whether you are a man or a woman, don’t ever do anything you don’t want to see in the headlines. That blurry, already fading line that separates your private life from your public life? It disappears the minute someone calls the police to complain about you.