Schadenfreude.

Damn but I love schadenfreude.

Remember back earlier in the year when then-Republican Charlie Crist was pushing a story that Marco Rubio had misused an AmEx card issued to him by the Florida Republican Party. This was supposed to be a killer allegation. Like just about everything else Charlie Crist has touched that strategy has rapidly turned to crap.

On Wednesday of last week, former Florida GOP chair Jim Greer was arrested and charged with theft, fraud, and money laundering in connection with a diversion of at least $125,000 dollars from the Florida GOP to himself by the use of a shell company called Victory Strategies LLC.

Jim Greer has apparently decided that he has no intention of going down by alone and probably figures that Charlie Crist will adapt to life in the prison laundry room much easier than he will.

Gov. Charlie Crist personally signed off on his former Republican party chairman’s confidential fundraising role with the state party – according to Jim Greer’s attorney, whose allegation contradicts the governor’s statement that he “didn’t know anything” about the deal now part of a criminal investigation.

[…]

But Greer’s attorney, Damon Chase, said Saturday that the deal giving them a 10 percent cut of party donations was legal. What’s more, Chase said Crist’s former right-hand man, now U.S. Sen. George LeMieux, first proposed the idea that they earn a fundraising commission to save the party money and replace the $30,000-a-month contract with fundraiser Meredith O’Rourke.

“You guys work hard. You deserve it,” Chase said Greer was told by the governor as they played pool in February 2009 at a Palm Beach golf tournament.

So now we have the sitting governor and a sitting senator from Florida in danger of being indicted for theft, fraud, and money laundering. In addition, we have the spectacle of the national Democrat party apparently tossing their own candidate, Representative Kendrick Meek, an African American from a prominent Florida political family, under the bus in order to support the newly “independent” Charlie Crist.

One hopes Michael Steele is reading this.