August 22, 2011 06:51 PM UTC

At Least He's Not Your Lieutenant Governor

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• by: Colorado Pols

Despite what some folks say in this story from The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, we have a really hard time believing that Missouri Republican Lt. Governor Peter Kinder is still going to end up getting elected to the top job of Governor when all is said and done:

Hoping to curb what has become a growing distraction to his political ambitions, Missouri Lt. Gov. Peter Kinder today talked more about his strip-club visits and how he came to be photographed with a stripper he knew.

The woman, Tammy Chapman, this month told the Post-Dispatch and other media outlets that Kinder was a frequent customer and sometimes made her uncomfortable in a Sauget strip club in the mid-1990s. The Riverfront Times earlier this month published a photograph of Chapman with the lieutenant governor.

In his first interview on the topic, Kinder, a Republican from Cape Girardeau who is widely expected to run for governor next year, said he first visited Diamond Cabaret in Sauget after a baseball game in St. Louis when he was a state senator in the mid-1990s. After that, he said, he returned about 10 times. He said he saw Chapman, a former Penthouse Magazine model who worked there as a dancer.

Kinder said he stopped visiting the club after he concluded that it contradicted his religious beliefs.

“I came to realize that this is not consistent with my upbringing. I’m a Christian,” he said. “I was raised in a good family, and I thought, you know, continuing to go there is leading me down the wrong path.” [Pols emphasis]

If you’re counting at home, Kinder went to this particular strip club about a dozen times before he decided that it “contradicted his religious beliefs” and/or was probably going to destroy his political career as a conservative Republican. But if you think that’s weird, that’s just the tip of the ol’ iceberg:

Kinder said he saw Chapman again earlier this year when he stopped at the bar she was working at to use the bathroom. He said he ordered a glass of wine and recognized her when she asked him to pose for a photograph.

He said the photograph “took a split second.” He said he did not ask Chapman to email it to him, and that he does not know how it came to be published in the Riverfront Times.

So…this woman that he may or may not have been sort-of stalking worked in another bar that he happened to visit “just to go to the bathroom,” but then he ended up ordering a glass of wine and took a picture with her. But it’s all innocent fun, or something.

Yeah. Good luck with all that.