I did not see it myself. But numerous readers told us late Friday how Chris Matthews devoted a substantial portion of Friday's Hardball to trumpeting an article in the New York Times exonerating Rudy on the Shag Fund front and lamenting how his beloved candidate's campaign was torpedoed by a bum rap.

If what the Times reported comes as a surprise, it shouldn't. Because it's what we were reporting as far back as November 30th. The initial story in the Politico suggested that the accounting funny business was intended to hide Rudy's shagging visits. But a look at the records themselves didn't bear that out. The real story was that late in his administration Rudy's team started putting more and more expenses effectively off the books to hide his increasingly high-living ways because he'd made a big point publicly about how he'd reduced spending in the mayor's office.

(As is so often the case, we came to this insight through the scrupulous and meticulously fair-minded research of Paul Kiel who, along with a group of TPM interns, figured this all out in a couple days with the documents.)

That was basically the argument Rudy's team was making -- that whatever fishy accounting techniques they were using, they were using them to cover Shag and non-Shag funding a like -- actually mainly non-Shag funding -- so the aim couldn't be to conceal his affair. That was basically right, only it was in the nature of things, not surprisingly, a difficult argument to make: We weren't just hiding shag, we were hiding everything!

And that wasn't the worst of his problems. The burst of press attention focused a bright light on something that had been partly known in the NYC press but had been the subject of little scrutiny during this campaign: the fact that as Mayor Rudy expended tens or perhaps hundreds of thousand of taxpayer dollars on his mistress while his wife and kids were still ensconced at the mayor's official residence, Gracie Mansion.

It wasn't just the Shag trips to the Hamptons, that was the least of it. It was NYPD security detail he had assigned to Nathan before their affair was even known -- on the basis to fairly obviously bogus 'threats' she face. The personal NYPD-expensed valet service she, her friends and family enjoyed thanks to Rudy. Even the NYPD-dog walking.

So was it a bum wrap? To me that's a highly debatable point. The original story got a key point wrong, though I guess I'd leave to others to debate exactly what was said in the original Politico story. But what sunk Rudy was the clear evidence that Rudy had used shifty accounting methods to conceal his high-living mayoral lifestyle and spent gobs of taxpayer dollars keeping his mistress up in style. Is that a bum rap?