Short Term

California’s neighbors pulled the plug on their governor’s real-life soap opera yesterday. In a roll call that took less than an hour, the state Senate voted to impeach Evan Mecham. There’s a lesson buried in there for the whole country. There’s such a thing as taking elections too casually.

Arizona has had its share of salty mavericks in politics over the years, but Mecham was different. He ran the state like some sort of sick joke. He seems never to have heard an ethnic slur he could resist passing on, preferably from a lectern with a microphone so that everyone could hear. He got it into his head that political rats were aiming laser beams at his house.

None of this figured in the impeachment, which was based on one charge of obstructing justice and one of misusing public funds. But these and other embarrassments were woven into the daily broadcasts of the impeachment proceedings that kept Arizonans glued to television sets and radios for weeks. Whether it all added up to a civics lesson will be revealed in a special election next month to pick Mecham’s successor.