Alex Sink might just as well have doused her campaign with kerosene and put a match to it.

Her dream of being governor went up in smoke Monday night.

It’s all but gone.

For some candidates, cheating during a TV debate, even lying about it afterward, might look like a mountain. But if they never cried out to voters, 'I'm the good and honorable one,' then it's a mountain they can climb.

Not so for Alex Sink, who spent the last 2 1/2 months setting herself up as the antipathy of wickedness.

Sink built her whole campaign on a kind of special righteousness. She emphasized the vast distance between her trustworthiness, honesty and character, and Rick Scott’s lack thereof.

It’s been an all-the-time thing from the beginning, this comparison between upstanding Democrat Alex Sink and sleazy Republican Rick Scott. Her ads, her press releases, her speeches – one after the other a sanctimonious comparison between evil and good (Scott and herself, respectively).

Well, now what does she do?

With the election like the iceberg just before Titanic hit, Sink is out there looking impending disaster in the eye. The CNN debate video of her reading a text message when it was against the rules has been linked and clicked and shown tens of thousands of times already, not only in this country but around the world.

That kind of notoriety, that kind of gossip-induced titillation, doesn’t go away in a week. Ask Sen. Mike Bennett, R-Bradenton.

Neither does the realization that Florida’s chief financial officer is virtually incapable of accepting responsibility. First she fired the “aide” who sent her the text message, then she kicked him by telling the press, “it was foolish” for him to do it. Is this a sample of how she would govern the state of Florida?

What we realize now is that she knew full well what the text message was when she said she didn’t. We know she cheated and we know she lied about it later.

If those are harsh words, they are at least fair ones.

And if Rick Scott chooses to play the Alex Sink Election Blues like a country-western song on a fiddle, in ads from now till Tuesday, who can blame him?

The bloom is off Alex Sink’s rose.

The pillars of righteousness on which her campaign was built disappeared Oct. 25 in a cloud of smoke.

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Reach Nancy Smith at nsmith@sunshinestatenews.com or (850) 727-0859.