Once again the eyes of the world are on Florida, where once again they are getting poked with a sharp stick. To those who have lived in Florida and know and love it for the fabulous entertainment it provides, two things come as no surprise: first, that the closest presidential election in recent history would wind up hingeing on the voting in this state; and second, that there would be allegations of "irregularities".
Florida breakfasts on irregularities. Florida gargles with irregularities, and spits.
Two years ago, Miami Mayor Xavier Suarez - affectionately called Mayor Loco because of idiosyncrasies that included unannounced late-night visits to constituents in his bathrobe - lost his job when it was revealed that his election involved many absentee ballots cast by persons who were technically dead or in other ways unaware that they had voted.
And so Suarez's opponent became the new mayor. That would be Joe Carollo - affectionately called Crazy Joe because of past idiosyncrasies that included publicly challenging a political rival to a duel.
Maybe it's the heat. Maybe it's the cultural cauldron that South Florida represents. Something makes people act crazy here.
For a time in the early 1990s, the publisher of the Miami Herald was so afraid of reprisals from right-wing elements of the Cuban-American community that - at the advice of the FBI - he began starting his car with a remote-control device from inside his house. This same publisher later publicly contemplated running for governor, a decision regarded as so intemperate and unwise that he was accused of lunacy, in print, by the star columnist of his own newspaper.
Most recently, a man in south-central Florida was convicted of animal abuse for killing his dog because he thought it was gay.
Florida is dangerous, in unusual ways. It has killer toads. It has killer alligators. It is the state in which one is most likely to be killed by lightning. It is the state that carried out a decades-long love affair with the electric chair, which it stopped using only recently, and somewhat reluctantly, after bad publicity when people's heads kept bursting into flames.
Florida's most recent bizarre national publicity, of course, involved the matter of Elian Gonzalez. Elian was the little boy from Cuba who was washed ashore and was adopted by relatives who refused to surrender him to his father, lionised for this act by a Cuban-American community that worshipped the boy as a sort of messiah.
It was during this contretemps that the telegenic young mayor of Metro-Dade, Alex Penelas - looked to for calming civic leadership - stood on a street corner and absolved the city of blame if the populace, in righteous indignation at the foul actions of Attorney General Janet Reno, rioted.
One of the calmest public voices during the Elian matter was that of Police Chief Donald Warshaw, widely praised nationally for having defied local authorities to help co-ordinate a peaceful rescue of the boy. Warshaw has since been indicted on charges that he looted a police charity and pension fund to pay for lavish dinners, hockey tickets, out-of-town trips, gifts to his girlfriend and hours and hours of phone sex services.
Another hero of the Gonzalez case was Kendall Coffey, the patrician, soft-spoken appellate lawyer credited with lending some sorely-needed dignity to the case. Coffey was the former US attorney in Dade County who lost his job after blowing a big case, going to a bar, buying a magnum of Dom Perignon champagne and biting a stripper on the arm.
It is not surprising that Coffey rebounded nicely from his ignominy. Florida has always shown a willingness to forgive its public officials their excesses. Mayor Loco, for example, has just won a seat on the Miami-Dade Republican committee and is thought likely to be its next chairman.
And consider the case of Alcee L. Hastings jnr, a federal judge from South Florida indicted in 1982 on charges that he conspired to accept bribes. A local jury acquitted him, but not long afterwards - looking at some of the same evidence - he was impeached by the House of Representatives, which did not have much doubt of his guilt. The vote was 413 to 3. Then the Senate convicted him and Hastings lost his job.
No problem. He simply ran for Congress. He won. He's still there, having been most recently re-elected on Tuesday. It wasn't close. No need for a recount.