For the Record

Just when the Republican majority in the State Senate had seized the moral high ground with Governor Spitzer on the defensive because of his aides' misuse of the State Police to try to embarrass Majority Leader Joe Bruno, the pendulum swung last week with the revelation that a notorious GOP dirty trickster had apparently struck again.

Roger Stone, whose past escapades include working for President Nixon's re-election committee during Watergate and leading a mini-riot to stop the counting of ballots for President in Miami during the disputed 2000 election, was forced from his job as a consultant to Mr. Bruno after he allegedly left an obscene, threatening message on the answering machine of Mr. Spitzer's father, Bernard.

The call was placed from Mr. Stone's Central Park South apartment. The caller warned the elder Spitzer that he would be forced to testify before Senate hearings about "shady campaign loans" he made to his son during the 1990s and referred to the Governor as "a phony, psycho piece of s---."

Mr. Stone denied making the call and accused his landlord, H. Dale Hemmerdinger - a major fund-raiser for the Governor - of framing him by giving someone unauthorized access to his apartment in order to place the call.

"All of this is, of course ... an attempt to distract people from the fact that no aide to the Governor is yet to testify under oath in the Troopergate matter and no e-mail records for Spitzer and his aides have been reviewed other then [sic] the ones given to Attorney General Cuomo," Mr. Stone wrote on his Web site.

"The guy who makes threatening phone calls to people is Eliot Spitzer not Roger Stone," he continued, referring to calls Mr. Spitzer had made in the past to former Lower Manhattan Development Corporation head John Whitehead and a State Senator who had displeased him.

The only problem was, Mr. Stone then presented his alibi, writing, "On the night this call was allegedly made, I was at the theater catching the play NIXON and FROST."

This story didn't hold up for long, however. The call was made on Aug. 6, a Monday night, the one day that "Nixon and Frost" is not performed. After this was pointed out, Mr. Stone's response was, "Well, then I'm mistaken."

Senator Bruno quickly cut ties with Mr. Stone, who was receiving $20,000 a month from the Senate majority leader, even though he said he didn't know whether the allegations about the phone call were accurate. "Whether it's true or not," he told reporters in Albany, "we are, until there's clarity, severing our relationship."

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Rudy Giuliani played a law-and-order prosecutor and a strict-on-gun-control Mayor in real life before taking a "whatever makes you happy" stance on gun regulation to improve his chances of getting the Republican nomination for President.

Fred Thompson played a TV prosecutor on "Law and Order" but he, too, is renouncing his old persona as he prepares to seek the GOP nomination.

He stated last week in an entry on his Web site regarding his time spent in the city, "There are lots of things about the place I like, but New York gun laws don't fall in that category."

The former U.S. Senator from Tennessee then took issue with a recent ruling by Federal District Judge Jack Weinstein aiding the Bloomberg administration in its effort to crack down on illegal gun sales, writing that "the same activist Federal Judge from Brooklyn who provided Mayor Giuliani's administration with the legal ruling it sought to sue gun-makers has done it again."

We realize actors constantly adapt to different roles, and that this was just Mr. Thompson's way of auditioning for "NRA Playhouse." Nonetheless, it reminded us of why his District Attorney Arthur Branch was never as endearing a character as the original "Law and Order" DA, Adam Schiff, and made us wish that the actor who played him, Steven Hill, would throw his hat into the ring. Then again, the Schiff character made clear his disdain for the phoniness and fund-raising that are so ingrained in the political process.