Rep. Ray LaHood wants Mary Harkrader and Camille Gibson booted off the Peoria City Election Commission for firing Executive Director Jeanette Mitzelfelt, the Journal Star reports. Whether or not they deserve to be ousted is a separate issue I’m not prepared to debate at this time. But I do think the situation is filled with irony.

One of the big reasons touted for why the city election commission is supposedly superior to the way the county clerk oversees elections is that the city election commission is bi-partisan and, thus, supposedly not as susceptible to political interference. But the charge now is that the commissioners acted on political motivations in firing Mitzelfelt. “The Peoria Board of Election Commissioners has never experienced a failure of the public’s trust,” the Election Commission’s website proudly states. Guess they’ll have to change that copy.

But getting back to LaHood. He’s quoted in the Journal Star as saying, “This is the most outrageous political move I’ve seen in a long, long time…. This is absolutely pure politics.” Well, Ray knows a little something about playing politics. Just a couple of months ago, he participated in retaliation against the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee’s deliberate leak of a classified document, then bragged about it to Fox News saying, “If the ranking member wants to play politics, there are some of us on the other side that can play politics, and I’m not afraid to do it.” Now he’s got his sites set on Harkrader and Gibson.

Is retaliation becoming a pattern for Ray?