Kwame gets kanned

Kwame, we hardly knew ye. The embattled mayor of the Motor City trades his City Hall office for a Wayne County jail cell.

Kwame M. Kilpatrick, the charismatic mayor of Detroit who has been embroiled in legal problems stemming from a sex scandal since the beginning of the year, pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice and agreed to resign Thursday morning as part of a deal with prosecutors.

He agreed to plead guilty to two felony counts of obstruction of justice and to plead no contest to a felony count of assault on a police officer; to pay restitution to the city of $1 million; to surrender his law license, forfeit his state pension to the city and be barred from elective office for five years; and to serve 120 days in the Wayne County jail, followed by five years’ probation. The other charges were dismissed. The judge in the obstruction case scheduled a formal sentencing hearing for Oct. 28.

All this stemming not merely from his adulterous affair with his chief of staff, Christine Beatty, but from firing police officers in an attempt to cover it up, from using millions of public dollars in what amounted to a bribe to keep the story under wraps, and from lying while under oath. As we have learned from other fallen angels - say it with me - it’s not the crime, it’s the cover-up.

There’s little mention of Beatty in the stories I’ve seen at CNN, NYT, and WaPo - as though she was just an extra in Kilpatrick’s made-for-Law & Order drama - but her own day in court is coming up.

I have to say that my schadenfreude level regarding Kwame’s komeuppance is somewhat lower than I had expected. Maybe the Edwards story burned me out - or sobered me up - on handmade tragedies like this.

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