September 26, 2014 11:56 AM UTC

May this news story never end: McInnis regrets apologizing for plagiarism

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• by: Jason Salzman

(From plagiarism to revisionist history, not a huge leap – promoted by Colorado Pols)

Fortunately for someone like me, who will never get enough of the 2010 election cycle, failed gubernatorial candidate Scott McInnis will never stop talking about it.

A great article today in the Grand Junction Sentinel states that McInnis has a big regret about how he handled the plagiarism scandal that torpedoed his gubernatorial campaign: apologizing for it, since he says he did nothing wrong at all.

McInnis, now running for Mesa County Commissioner, told the Sentinel he "should have dug [his] heels in" and "brought up more about the Hasan family."

The Sentinel's Emily Shockley reports:

“I didn’t plagiarize, period,” [McInnis] said. But, at the behest of political advisers, he did make apologies for the situation ever happening. That situation involved a researcher ghost-writing the articles in question, which turned out to have several sections lifted from an old work by current Colorado Supreme Court Justice Gregory J. Hobbs Jr.

“I would have dug my heels in and I would have brought up more about the Hasan family,” McInnis said.

“I’ve used ghost writers my whole career. I would have said I didn’t make the mistake. I wasn’t dishonest then and I’m not dishonest now.”

If he'd done that, maybe we'd have heard more from McInnis' ghost writer, Rolly Fischer, who spoke so eloquently to Channel 7's John Ferrugia at the time, before he went into hiding.

If McInnis had thrown his researcher even deeper under the bus, and dug in deeper, it would have made an already great news story even better.