Someone call a shrink, stat!
That was our thought after reading Maricopa County Attorney Andrew Thomas' revealing interview with the Arizona Republic over the weekend.
Thomas was apparently giving the daily of record his first candid interview after a climactic week that saw a visiting judge remove him from prosecuting County Supervisor Mary Rose Wilcox and dismiss the indictment against her, too. That basically forced Thomas to dismiss the criminal cases against Presiding Criminal Court Judge Gary Donahoe and Supervisor Don Stapley, too.
But the county attorney was nothing if not delusional about his losses. Indeed, he didn't seem to understand that Judge John Leonardo had offered a sober-minded rebuke of his ethical missteps.
Instead, he seemed convinced that he was being thwarted by -- gasp! -- an "invisible network."
Here's the full quote, courtesy of the Republic's Michael Kiefer: "I may have underestimated the sheer extent of the invisible network of people in power."
Wow. Just wow.
Apparently, Chief Deputy David Hendershott's paranoia is catching.
Indeed, we heard from a psychologist friend that a term coined by the French may provide some insight into the symbiosis between the Sheriff's Office and the county attorney. It's called "folie a deux" -- and, no, we don't know how to pronounce that either.
According to the online dictionary we consulted, this condition literally translates as "double madness." It can refer, the dictionary says, to "the presence of the same or similar delusional ideas in two persons closely associated with one another."
So Hendershott thinks everybody from the Anti-Defamation League to Phil Gordon is out to get the Sheriff's Office. And Andrew Thomas thinks that an "invisible network of people in power" is thwarting his attempts to prosecute county officials.
Armchair psychologists that we are, we might be tempted to employ the term "paranoid schizophrenia." But folie a deux has a much nicer ring to it, don't you think?
