My Kingdom for Anatabloc!

And, oh, what a kingdom it was – lavish trips, lavish loans, lavish shopping sprees. Yet it collapsed amid a scandalous infatuation with power and prestige.

It crumbled under the sway of Jonnie Williams, a snake oil salesman, a flimflam man. It collapsed in comedy, not tragedy.

Despite a Marie Antoinette defense, the McDonnells will journey to the guillotine of Public Opinion, a not so inviting place for a conservative Republican who at one time had been mentioned as a possible presidential candidate.

The McDonnells – Gov. Bob and his wife (yes, still; but for how long?), Maureen, the Queen of Mean – will go down in Virginia history as an Ibid.

Virginia's patricians might rise from their graves over McDonnell's guilt, corruption and shameless and embarrassing revelations of a husband blaming his wife and the wife pleading mercy mercy for it wasn't really me who did all those mean things while First Lady. So are we to believe it was the former First Lady's doppelganger?

The trial captivated and titillated. It was reality TV and a continuous loop of loopiness.

In Old French, the word corrupt means to mar, bribe or destroy. A more vivid definition is also from the 14^th century, from Middle English; to corrupt is to infect and contaminate, such as this example: the corrupting smell of death.

Apply whichever definition suits your fancy.

But the material corruption of the McDonnells, husband and wife, isn't the issue. Nor is it their spiritual corruption, though it could be said they infected the halls of power.

It is the corrupted image. More precisely, it is the corrupted image of Maureen McDonnell, which will hang in the hallowed halls of the Capitol for all to view.

Future generations will marvel at the former First Lady's portrait; they will wonder if this was the same woman who prowled the walls of power smashing egos and pining away in desperation for another man. Or perhaps she only imagined that she was infatuated or she was overwrought or that this was how she was portrayed or how she viewed herself.

The King James version of the Bible says Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth...

Grave is the image for us to see.

It is strange indeed to see a woman transformed for all posterity.

A millennium in the future, an archaeologist will stumble across the portrait of the former First Lady in the basement of the Capitol, buried beneath the bones of past politicians and patricians of this aristocratic Commonwealth.

This hybrid of man and machine will restore the former First Lady to her rightful place in history and she will be forever known as a woman trampled by the exigencies of fancy and flight.

Resurrected by history, future generations will see her as she wanted to be seen, not as she really was.