The GOP is worried about the Fann race in house district 16, St. Charles County. Or at least Kit Bond is, since Fann’s Republican opponent, Mark Parkinson, is Bond’s protegee, and Bond figures the Republican mayor of St. Peters has been … too kind … to Tom Fann. Parkinson is barely thirty and has only one job on his resume: as an aide to Kit Bond.

So we know why Bond wants Parkinson to win. Let me tell you why I believe Bond is worried about his guy: he bothered to show up in St. Charles within the last few days to ream out Mayor Len Pagano (pictured at left) for apparently endorsing Tom Fann.

Not that Pagano did endorse Fann. Not really. It all started when a Fann campaign worker put together a piece of campaign literature with a picture of Fann and Pagano on the back, with words of praise from Pagano about Tom. Those words were in quotation marks, but weren’t actually quoted. They were only the gist of remarks Pagano had made about Fann. Fann himself, preoccupied at the time with his daughter’s kidney infection, didn’t proofread and approve the literature before it went out on a doorhanger to several thousand homes.

The substance of Bond’s conversation with Pagano was: THREAT–according to a well connected birdie I know. St. Peters is waiting impatiently on FEMA funds needed to complete the Highway 370 project there. Bond said he could make those FEMA funds go away permanently. He also mentioned that there were still a few days left before the filing deadline in the mayoral race and that if Pagano didn’t disavow endorsing Fann, the Republicans would find themselves a primary challenger.

OK, that last was not a very credible threat, but it made Pagano understand that Bond was seriously displeased. And naturally, he did what the senator told him to do; he wrote the local papers to complain that those words on the flyer were not an accurate quotation of anything he had said and that he was not endorsing either candidate.

Not surprisingly, Pagano is not advertising the conversation with Bond to the press, but anyone who cared to check Kit Bond’s travel records would find he was in the metro area at the time.

Pagano, who had been quietly speaking to folks about Fann’s virtues, will certainly shut up about that subject now. Too bad.

Oh, and by the way, part of the reason Bond is so upset about the race is that the Republican internal polls indicate that Fann is winning the race. Bond never had to put any pressure on any St. Charles County pol before now. Until the last year or two, all the Republicans had to do to win there was spend a bajillion dollars and wait for the election results they wanted to see.

But the tide is shifting in St. Chuck. With less than two weeks to go until the election, Fann needs people to knock on doors for him and cinch this victory. If you need some motivation to help out, just imagine Kit Bond on election night turning people and screaming that his guy must have lost because of voter fraud. Couldn’t possibly be because folks are getting fed up with the GOP.