CNN this week chided the Newt Gingrich campaign for attempting to scrub references to Gingrich’s infidelity and ethics problems from his Wikipedia site.

Gingrich is the latest Republican to be caught trying to keep voters in the dark about his extramarital activity.  Republican gubernatorial candidate Rick Hill was caught doing the same here in Montana.

The Billings Gazette reported that:

Wikipedia locked down former U.S. Congressman Rick Hill’s biography page Monday, after more than 30 attempts to add or scrub details about Hill’s past campaigns and his 1976 divorce.

The edits by Hill’s campaign manager included links to articles about Hill’s infidelity to his first wife, and articles describing his nasty campaign tactics in past elections.  I guess they didn’t want us to read about things like this Associated Press article from back in the 1990s, describing an episode during Rick Hill’s affair with a cocktail waitress at the Sip N’ Dip Lounge in Great Falls, the bar with the live mermaid tank.

Spaulding remembered learning about the affair after Hill began coming home very late at night. She recalled packing their three sons, aged 18 months to 8 years, in a car once and driving to the Sip-N-Dip lounge where she saw Hill with the other woman. She said she begged him without success to come home.

To be sure, it is probably pretty commonplace for candidates to monitor and ask for edits to their Wikipedia pages. What’s interesting here is the obsessive number attempts to make the same edits. It shows how far Republicans are willing to go to try to keep the public in the dark about their boss’s true characters.