Coda

In a town where I once lived, themayor, who was a friend of mine, also happened to be gay. Not many people in town cared about that fact, and didn't give him any trouble about it. They were much more interested in where he stood on the issue of mosquito spraying.

Then came the fateful day when he took a pick-up load of junk that had been accumulating in his garage to the dump (in that town, you could take your own trash to the dump, but most people avoided the place on account of vermin), and accidentally grazed the head of another dump patron with a broken pole lamp as he threw it out the back of his truck.

"Hey, watch where you're throwing stuff," the other guy said angrily. "What are you, blind?"

"Sorry," my friend said. "I'll be more careful."

At which point the guy apparently recognized him. "Aren't you the gay mayor?" he asked.

"I suppose so," my friend said.

"That figures," the guy said, as if that explained everything.

At which point my friend understood a sad fact. Once you go into local politics, your personal life is never truly personal anymore, even if you're at the dump, surrounded by rats.

In New Jersey these days, nobody knows that better than Republican Andrew Lucas - former mayor and current member of the Manalapan Township Committee - who was recently the victim of a gross invasion of privacy perpetrated by a Democratic political rival named Stuart Moskovitz (another former Manalapan mayor and former township attorney) who secured the services of a private detective to follow Lucas around.

Here's what that the detective discovered:

Even though Lucas has lived in Manalapan for almost all of his 30-year life (except college), registered to vote there, owns property and pays taxes there, he doesn't always sleep there. In fact, between October and January of last year, Lucas spent a lot of time at the home of his new wife in Freehold. After the first of the year, she moved into his home in Manalapan, where she resides today. But even Lucas admits that between the times they got married in October and she moved to Manalapan in January, he had a number of overnighters at her place. They were married, after all.

So what's the big, hairy deal? Well, if you have to ask that question, you just don't knowManalapan politics, which is as nasty as local politics gets.

Moskovitz - who took his story to the Asbury Park Press, which reported it in a front-page story March 4 without asking the most important questions, "Why are you bringing this garbage to us?" and "What's in it for you?"- used the fact that his private detective followed Lucas to Freehold on several occasions after township committee meetings and stayed there all night as evidence that Lucas doesn't live in Manalapan. As part of a third-party complaint he filed against Lucas, Moskovitz was able to subpoena Lucas' wife's electricity bills and canceled rent checks as additional "evidence" that Lucas was living in Freehold.

Therefore, Moskovitz claims, Lucas is perpetrating some kind of fraud on local voters. Moskovitz told the APP he plans to make a residency complaint against Lucas later this year.

Good luck with that one, counselor. If every local pol with a second home down the shore had a private detective hired by a political rival following them to the beach house on Friday night, the increased traffic on the Garden State would make it a parking lot. Politician. Detective. Politician. Detective. Politician. Detective. And on and on and on.

So why did Moskovitz really hire a detective to follow Lucas around? Well, Lucas says he did it for two reasons.

Reason One: revenge. Lucas is a member of the committee that voted to bring a malpractice case against Moskovitz for allegedly failing to protect Manalapan's interest in a land deal when he was township attorney. That case is still in court, but it might not have gone forward without Lucas to support it in the first place.At this point, Lucas says Moskovitz wants to get even and get him recused so he can't vote on the issue again.

Reason Two: misdirection. Lucas says Moskovitz doesn't like being in the spotlight for the malpractice case, and is eager to do anything to divert public attention away from it. As skeevy as it was to sic a private detective on his rival, Moskovitz was still able to get the Asbury Park Press to put his story on page one. So, for at least a day, the focus was not on him, but on one of his opponents.

Is Lucas right in his belief? I don't know for sure, even though it makes sense.

What I do know is this: Nobody says there's anything illegal about an elected official having a second home and staying there from time to time. And Lucas didn't even own a second home; he was just occasionally staying at his new wife's house until they moved into his place in Manalapan. Therefore, he did nothing fraudulent, and hiring a private detective to follow him around to "document" this non-issue is about as far over the line as anything I've seen.

Moskovitz should be ashamed of doing that, of invading this young couple's privacy in such an intrusive fashion. I doubt he is though. He'll have a zillion reasons why he wasn't doing anything beyond the bounds of decency (he's an attorney, after all, and he's never at a loss for words or explanations). And there'll be a handful of anonymous supporters and bloggers who will back himup andmake a lot of vitriolic, hateful noise in the process.

But the whole deal may eventually backfire. If anything will ever make the reasonable Democrats and Republicans in Manalapan say "Basta! Enough!" and start working together for the benefit of the community, it might be this incredibly personal attack on Lucas. What sane person would ever want to run for public office there, if this is the nonsense they can expect? In the interest of the community's future, shouldn't somebody finally draw the line?

It would be nice, at the next Township Committee meeting, to see speaker after speaker from both sides of the political aisle come to the microphone to condemn this invasion of privacy and gutter-level personal attack. The longest journey begins with a single step, after all.

Since we are talking about Manalapan here, I don't know if that will happen - but we can always dream.

Gregory Bean is executive editor of Greater Media Newspapers. To comment on this opinion, you can write him at gbean@gmnews.com.