Gaffey under investigation... again.

From the Courant (By JON LENDER And EDMUND H. MAHONY):

A veteran Democratic state senator double-billed the state and his own political action committee for thousands of dollars' worth of expenses for travel and posh hotels over a four-year period, state records show.

The payments to 14-year Sen. Thomas P. Gaffey, D-Meriden, are now under investigation by the State Elections Enforcement Commission...

This is not Gaffey's first expense-billing scrape. In 2002, it was revealed that he and another state legislator, then employed by the trash agency, collected state legislators' mileage reimbursements for their trips to and from their homes to Hartford in trash agency vehicles, but had lagged thousands of dollars behind in reimbursing the trash agency for their personal mileage on the same vehicles.

In addition, Gaffey received some unwelcome attention about a year ago when Courant columnist Kevin Rennie revealed that Gaffey was having an affair, confirmed in e-mails, with Connecticut State University System legislative liaison Jill Ferraiolo while he aggressively pushed a billion dollars in bonds for the university system. Rennie also wrote that Gaffey had long made incomplete disclosures on the use of the PAC credit card.

Anyone else reminded of that now-famous image of Duh Guvernator explaining his all-too-frequent encounters with women in his earlier days?

"Well... you know... where there's smoke, there's fire!"

Tim White