Mark Mayfield’s death in Mississippi has caused more than your run-of-the-mill grief among his family and closest friends.

It makes others of us far from the Magnolia State sad in ways we likely cannot explain.

http://news.yahoo.com/miss-tea-party-leader-mark-mayfields-death-sign-195718564.html

Mayfield was a high-powered lawyer and political operative in Mississippi who was implicated in one of the more bizarre political scandals of recent times. He was one of several men accused of conspiring to break into a nursing home to take pictures of the stricken, bed-ridden wife of U.S. Sen. Thad Cochran in the middle of Cochran’s primary campaign against state Sen. Chris McDaniel.

Why take pictures of Mrs. Cochran? She suffers from dementia and the McDaniel allies allegedly were making a campaign video to smear Sen. Cochran because he’s been seen in the company of another woman while traveling here and there.

Mayfield, a local tea party big-wig, was found dead in his home of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

This is a tragic outcome to a bizarre political story.

Cochran won the Mississippi Republican Party runoff this past Tuesday against McDaniel, despite all the polls that showed McDaniel to be leading by a significant margin. The senator now likely is going to be re-elected to his seventh term.

I don’t know much about Mayfield, other than his close tea party ties and his many political connections in Mississippi. Police have ruled his death a suicide, so it’s reasonable to presume he was feeling shame over whatever role he played in trying to defeat Sen. Cochran.

How does one honor such a man? He doesn’t deserve high praise because he took his life over guilt.

This whole sordid episode seems to portend just how personal some campaigns are liable to get, not to mention the response to some of the tactics that occur.

Yahoo.com report: “An aide to McDaniel accused mainstream Republicans of politicizing the nursing home scandal to build sympathy for Cochran, at Mayfield’s expense.

“’The politicization of the incident was beyond the pale,’ McDaniel aide Keith Plunkett tells Politico.”

I’d argue, though, that what was really beyond the pale was the break-in at the nursing home.