One wonders:

Rep. Mark Kirk, a vanilla-moderate Republican from Chicago’s North Shore, represents one of the GOP’s best shots at picking up a blue-state Senate seat. Last week, however, his squeaky-clean image suffered a blow, when it was revealed that Kirk had taken sole credit for an award given to his former Navy intelligence unit. “I simply misremembered it wrong,” he told the Chicago Sun-Times. “I want to be very contrite and say there is a casualness with which I sometimes describe military details. And if it gave the impression that my military record is larger than it was, I want to apologize.”

While Kirk’s résumé embellishment is unseemly, his timing is worse.

More here.