It must be nice to have so much money that you can afford to crank out thousand-dollar checks by the bushel and hardly notice it.

Safe to say the Barons of Burlington are in this category, because they continue to broaden their roster of Republican state Senate candidates, each new one seemingly less likely than the last. The newest tchotchke in their collection: Larry Hart, Sr. — or alternatively Larry Wayne Hart — this year’s challenger to Orange County’s nearly perpetual incumbent Democrat Mark MacDonald.

Mr. Hart has previously featured in this space as a mystery candidate who had failed to submit any campaign finance reports. At first I took this to mean that he wasn’t doing anything and hadn’t even bothered to submit a No Activity Report. I heard later that he’d boasted of having $30,000 in the bank. Well, now we know, and the truth is just about exactly in the midpoint of those two speculations. And the bulk of his money came from, you guessed it, the Barons of Burlington. Some of ’em, anyway.

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