I recently received a particularly nasty bit of campaign mail. This attempted smear, lacking in facts and using laughable references, left me wondering: Who would stoop to this kind of tactic to attack a retired schoolteacher in her quest to be elected to a small-town Council in a nonpartisan election?

The answer: Allen Skillicorn. If the name is unfamiliar to most of us, that’s understandable, as he is a new arrival from the Midwest. His backstory might help to explain this noxious behavior.

Skillicorn served one-and-a-fraction terms as an elected Republican member of the Illinois General Assembly. Starting as one of the legislature’s least educated or qualified members, his ambition continually outweighed achievements during his tenure. His most noteworthy event was being disciplined for skipping work, staying away from the statehouse as others cast his legislative votes while he was a couple hundred miles away.

Upon losing re-election in 2020, Skillicorn immediately resigned his seat. Thus, he left his angry constituents without representation while he packed up a trailer and moved to Fountain Hills, where he now seeks to reinvent himself among a friendly and unquestioning partisan base.

In other words, Skillicorn displays the qualities of a prototypical carpetbagger. That term is defined as someone who moves to an area in which they have no ties in order to exploit the local populace for their own political and financial gain. Apparently, the modern twist simply involves online mudslinging and venom-spewing via cheap mailers as attention-grabbing devices.

Fountain Hills deserves better than a quitter – especially one who had an awful work record in prior elected office. Find your suckers and rubes elsewhere, Mr. Skillicorn.