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Dear Kevin Jackson:

I'd like to start by saying I expected to dislike you. My prejudged prejudice was bred by a combination of your wife's efforts to introduce creationism into Rio Rancho schools and your leadership of New Mexico Family Council - Best Choice, a Christian group that promotes, among other things, abstinence education.

With that background, I figured that you, as a candidate last year, would be yet another in a long line of idealogues injecting your worldview into what is a basic political job: mayor of Rio Rancho.

I was shocked when you won. Had the City of Vision lost its vision?

Bah. Rio Rancho gets what it deserves.

Or so I thought.

And then I met you. You came on "In Focus," the show I moderate on KNME-Channel 5, with Albuquerque Mayor Martin Chavez. The two of you had already built a promising relationship between two cities that have spent too much time sneering at each other.

You seemed genuine, humorous, smart and sincerely concerned about the young city (compared with Albuquerque) that raised you.

During last summer's floods, you were unbelievably busy. But you carved out an hour or so to meet with me at City Hall to talk about what the city was doing to fix damaged neighborhoods and to ensure such problems didn't plague the city's future neighborhoods.

You even guided me out to the worst of the damage, where you didn't relegate me to a drive-by. No, we left our cars and, despite you risking being late for your next meeting, you stayed and explained.

My instincts told me you were a rarity in modern-day politics: a down-to-earth, unpolished, unpackaged, un-blow-dried, unpretentious person. A good guy.

And now - with you fired from your job, censured by your City Council and under investigation for the way you managed money at Family Choice and at the city - I'm wondering if those admirable qualities aren't precisely what's deepening the doo-doo you're already in.

Every professional politician worth his or her slickness knows the first rule of soothing a scandal: Come clean. Call a news conference and deliver however lame an excuse you can, apologize for the static and vow to do whatever you can to help whomever you can make everything right again.

You, instead, lawyered up - a wise move, given the way Family Choice canned you. And your lawyer did what lawyers do - told you to say next to nothing to anyone.

So reporters' calls go ignored. The city councilors go clueless. The voters who put you into office go wondering.

All while your name whirls in a gossip blender that proves the second rule of soothing a scandal: The appearance of impropriety is as bad as impropriety itself.

Chavez, the mayor with whom you've built what he calls a solid relationship, nailed it the other day. He told me, more delicately than this: Come out, come out, wherever you are. Offer an explanation. Answer questions from reporters, from city councilors, from Rio Ranchoans. Be the clean, honest, transparent guy we once took you for.

From my point of view - that is, as a math-challenged journalist - you could easily have been baffled by bureaucratic red tape and simply bungled yourself into trouble.

Chavez raised the word "naive." That might work.

As scandals go, this is peanuts. Heaven knows, the money we're talking about doesn't come near the amounts that threw politicians like former state Treasurers Michael Montoya and Robert Vigil and former state Senate President Manny Aragon into public disdain. (Or, should I say, even more public disdain than they were when their polished, packaged, pretentious selves were in office.)

Either you made a rookie mistake, from which you can recover, or you did something seriously wrong, for which you must pay. By the way you're behaving, you're flouting the former and proving the latter.

You struck me as better than that. Trust me on this: I hate being wrong.

Come out, come out, wherever you are.

Prove me right for liking you.