NJ Lt. Gov. Dale Caldwell under investigation for alleged inappropriate behavior toward women: reports

Two weeks into a new administration and the lieutenant governor is already under investigation for how he treats women in the workplace. That's not a slow news day story. That's a "how did nobody vet this guy" story.

Give Sherrill's office some credit here. They didn't sit on it, didn't try to manage it quietly through some internal HR process that never sees daylight. They brought in a former attorney general to actually run the thing. That's the right instinct, and if this were a Republican administration doing the same thing we'd be saying so just as plainly. Voters deserve to know whether the guy who'd be a heartbeat away from the governor's chair has a pattern of behavior nobody bothered to ask about before Election Day.

But that's exactly the question worth sitting with. Caldwell didn't parachute in from nowhere. He was vetted, picked, campaigned with, and elected on a ticket. If these allegations are as serious as the reporting suggests, somebody either missed it or looked past it. New Jersey voters get to decide which is worse.

None of this is about scoring points off Trenton's misery. It's about the basic promise every campaign makes and then quietly hopes nobody checks: that the people asking for power have actually been checked out first. Caldwell deserves a real investigation, not a political pile-on, and so does everyone who says he crossed a line. But whatever Porrino finds, the bigger story here might be the process that put him in office in the first place.