even if guilty, Ms. Huntley was still probably an upgrade over the state senator she replaced, who once allegedly bit a police officer and had to be maced. In this region of southeastern Queens, you see, it's currently easier to count the number of elected officials -- at every level of government -- who aren't under investigation than those who are. Furthermore, $30,000 counts as mere pocket change compared to the graft that got some of Ms. Huntley's colleagues convicted in the last year. By the way, political scandals are anything but confined to Queens County. The day before Ms. Huntley's hastily scheduled "Emergency Press Conference," Assemblyman Vito Lopez, the powerful boss of Brooklyn's Democratic Party, saw his political future implode when bombshell sexual harassment charges were announced in a detailed report from Speaker Shelly Silver. Mr. Lopez declared his innocence, but additional allegations emerged in explicit detail over the coming days, shattering his control over the borough's Democratic establishment. And when someone as big as Mr. Lopez goes down, it's not a controlled explosion; there's going to be collateral damage. Indeed, it turned out that Mr. Silver, one of the "three men in a room" that control all decision-making in Albany, had quietly shielded Mr. Lopez from previous sexual harassment claims, using over a hundred thousand dollars in taxpayer dollars to confidentially settle and shelve the cases. What's more, the offices of State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman and Comptroller Tom DiNapoli were reportedly involved in the settlement, causing all