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Those moral majority/family values hits just keep on coming, don't they?

Of course, we have those original Southern classics in Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, holy rollers who rolled themselves right out of a lucrative congregation.

We had Jimmy Swaggart, who preached fire and brimstone on TV and enjoyed some of it on the side.

We had the late Jerry Falwell, whose Liberty University has cluttered the Justice Department with partisan lawyers and who tried to pin 9/11 not on theocratic terrorists but on American "sinners" - namely homosexuals and the American Civil Liberties Union.

We had Pat Robertson, who blamed Hurricane Katrina not on nature, failed federal levees or even global warming, but on that sinful city of New Orleans.

We had Denver's Ted Haggard, who bashed gays from his pulpit while he cavorted with one who supplied him with crystal meth.

We had a nasty, highly public power struggle at Calvary Chapel, right here on the Rio Grande, in which Pastor Skip Heitzig was accused of using church assets to further his national ministry.

And now, up in Rio Rancho, where there seem to be more churches per capita than in Rome, we have Mayor Kevin Jackson, a founding father of the New Mexico Family Values Council - Best Choice.

City officials are investigating Jackson's use of a city-issued credit card while mayor at the same time State Police are looking into accusations of check fraud during the time Jackson worked for the Family Council - the save-traditional-marriage, abstinence-only-sex-education, heterosexuals-rule group he once headed.

Speaking of values, maybe the council should consider a symposium for executive directors, preachers, pastors and nuclear family advocates on civics, honesty, integrity and fiscal responsibility. Call it Practice What You Preach 101.

Facing a federal investigation into how it has spent its federal abstinence-only sex education grant - never mind, of course, that the research shows it doesn't work - the council last month exercised its survival instinct and fired its founding papa, Jackson.

Wednesday night, the Rio Rancho City Council censured Jackson for spending thousands of dollars on entertainment - including for guests who say they didn't go - at the city's sparkling Santa Ana Star Casino Events Center. So who ate all the popcorn, hot dogs and apple pie?

Given all that, it's still absolutely astonishing how hypocritical America's religious and family-values leaders can be.

From North Carolina, one of the original 13 colonies, to upstart Rio Rancho, Americans really need a massive infusion of skepticism about all those telling them how to live their lives, while the tellers seem to cross the line, almost religiously.

Do they really think, like the current American leadership in Washington, D.C., that they are above the law - God's and man's?

Tell you what I think: There are about three too many R's in the righteous, religious right.