He was way, waaaaay worse than we realized.

And we already knew he was pretty bad.

And he was, somehow, a legit national figure in his field.

Submitted for your consideration: Bill Bohnyak, former Orange County Sheriff and second runner-up in the Tunbridge Fair’s hotly-contested Alexander Lukashenko Lookalike Contest, now revealed to be a financial mismanager on an epic scale.

Reminder: This guy was president of the National Sheriffs’ Association. Well, he was until he somehow managed to lose his bid for re-election last year, after which he no longer qualified to hold the position. In the past I’ve wondered if Vermont really needed sheriffs at all; if Bohnyak was a prominent national leader of his kind, I wonder if the whole country would be better off without them. Actually, check that. I don’t wonder. I’m convinced.

Bohnyak was also a frequent and respected presence in the Statehouse, strutting around in his physics-defyingly skin-tight uniforms, advocating for the interests of law enforcement in general and the sheriffs in particular.

And now here we are, with auditors throwing up their hands and walking away from a mandatory audit of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department because its financial records were a complete shambles.

Credit to his profession, I tell you.

Now, you might expect — I certainly did — that Bohnyak’s casual approach to bookkeeping was a perhaps understandable reaction to his surprising election defeat. To a part-time deputy, no less. Those voters are ingrates! I’ll show ’em!

And indeed, a lot of his negligence took place after Election Day. There were questionable awards given to his employees, like cell phones and cell service on the department’s dime and $19,000 in advances to employees who have since left the department and for which no documentation has been found. He also apparently ordered a bunch of repairs and upgrades on department vehicles which he didn’t pay for — and then sold the vehicles. Plus, as was previously documented, he refused to cooperate in the transfer of power and actively urged his deputies to quit.

Kind of extreme, but Bohnyak was a self-entitled politician who reacted to his defeat with a container ship’s worth of spite. But the auditors also found plenty of iffy activity before the election, which makes me wonder how much of this stuff went on throughout Bohnyak’s 16 years as sheriff.

I’m overusing the italics here, but good God, every single slanty letter seems apropos.

Auditors found that the department was carrying a $100,000 line of credit on which it had stopped making payments; it borrowed $225,000 in 2019 for building upgrades and instead spent it on vehicles, bonuses and office expenses; and his successor George Contois says when he took office, he found “dozens and dozens and dozens — I’m not exaggerating — of invoices that were never sent out.”

Bohnyak is likely to get nothing more for his excellent work than a taxpayer-funded pension, as state Auditor Doug Hoffer says no criminality is involved because there’s no evidence that Bohnyak enriched himself. He just awarded his cronies. And did a piss-poor job of managing his department.

We already knew that Bohnyak did his level best to sabotage his successor. Now we know he was an awful administrator.

And he was president of the goddamn National Sheriffs’ Association! And a respected figure in Vermont politics and law enforcement!

This year, the Legislature approved — and Gov. Phil Scott signed — a bill reforming the sheriffs’ system. It’s a good first step, but it’s not enough. We need to end these little fiefdoms, regularize law enforcement and make it all accountable to the people they are supposedly in office To Serve And Protect. It’s clear that our sheriffs are not nearly accountable enough.