There’s something funny going on when it comes to Vince Fumo these days. And I don’t mean funny ‘strange.’ I mean funny ‘ha-ha.’

Let’s face it. It was never any great stretch of the imagination to expect that Vince Fumo might end his career being labeled a crook. There was always an air of shadiness to his powerful dealings and his money deals. People recognized that he brought a lot of money to the city even as they suspected he liked to take a little taste for himself. People recognized that he was a powerful politician, while at the same time recognizing that sometimes that entailed running roughshod over people, legal procedures and common ethics.

I don’t think anyone was really surprised when that 139 count indictment came down, and if in the end he is found guilty…well, it will only be surprising in that he didn’t figure out some way to weasel out of it all.

But there seems to be something else going on more and more nowadays. Something even more shocking.

Let me explain by pointing to a couple recent items in the news. The first is an article about the audits alleging misuse of public funds in the Pennsylvania Higher Education Assistance Agency:

Expenses no longer permitted at PHEAA: $162.26 for congratulatory baby gifts for three clients. $1,720 for Washington Wildthings baseball game tickets for clients. $3,351.60 for chrome pen and pencil sets for employees for 15 years of service. $16,300 for 2,000 T-shirts as giveaways at Penn State basketball games. $10,024 for iPods as sweepstakes prizes to promote PHEAA's Web site. $90 in towing charges for a new hire because of a miscommunication about parking rules. $3,000 for a golf outing with school clients.

Now if you were under indictment for dozens of instances of misuse of public funds, don’t you think you might want to avoid loudly cracking sarcastic jokes about someone questioning another case of potential misuse of funds? Well, not Vince:

The state's student aid agency has been hammered for its spending and adopted more frugal policies. But a prominent board member says those cutbacks might be damaging its earning power.

"If we continue down this trail and we're not going to get as much money, let's get out of the business ... rather than watch the death of a thousand cuts of this agency," Sen. Vince Fumo, D-Philadelphia, told members of the Pennsylvania Higher Education Assistance Agency board on Thursday.

His comments were made in a spirited discussion about an internal audit that looked at PHEAA employees' compliance with the belt-tightening policies enacted last year. The board also discussed the agency's response to state Auditor General Jack Wagner's office's first-ever audit of PHEAA....

Citing a $40.75 purchase of juice for an orientation of new hires among the 101 charges questioned by Wagner's office, Fumo said, "I'm really glad the auditor general caught us giving away drinks."

Or take the article in last Wednesday’s Daily News about arrests made in the murder of two armored-truck guards last October. One odd pair of sentences jump out:

District Attorney Lynne Abraham yesterday announced the arrests of two men she said were involved in supplying the gun used to kill two armored-truck guards last October.

She was joined by Attorney General Tom Corbett, state Sen. Vince Fumo, Homicide Captain Michael Costello, and Inspector David Jardine.

One of these things is not like the other, as the old Sesame Street song went. You’ve got the DA, the AG, two police officials…and Senator Fumo. As far as I know, Vince Fumo is not the one who cracked the case, so I can only imagine he was hoping for some reflected glory as a great crimebuster. Has anyone seen the video of the press conference? Did Fumo happen to be wearing a cape and cowl, with a big ‘V’ emblazoned across his shirt? Is he trying to do a Rudy Giuliani, portraying himself as the only one who stands between us and mayhem? What reflected glory will he be seeking next? Will we see him hovering behind some schoolgirl winner of a middle school spelling bee? Will he claim that he was right beside Mitt Romney when Romney hallucinated marching with Martin Luther King, Jr?

The thing is, you talk to people about these things, and they…giggle! They say things like ‘the llama poop must be affecting his brain’ or ‘I think he’s been standing with his head too close to those vacuum cleaners.’

The jokes are becoming more common in the press as well. Take, for example, this bit in the Daily News about the asking price of Fumo’s Green Street mansion being dropped by a million bucks:

Sure sign we're in a recession: Prudential Fox has dropped the price on state Sen. Vince Fumo's 27-room Victorian mansion from $6.9 million to $5.9 million.

Fumo put the house, at 22nd and Green, on the market in October to pay legal bills in his federal corruption case.
Besides six bedrooms and seven full baths, the mansion boasts a wine cellar, an indoor shooting range, a roof deck, a separate guest suite and separate servants' quarters.

No mention of the 19 Oreck vacuum cleaners the feds charged him with stealing from his nonprofit Citizens Alliance for Better Neighborhoods.

Yep, there's those vacuum cleaners again. It just seems that more and more, in the news and on the street, the name Vince Fumo is more associated with vacuum cleaners, alpaca farms, bobblehead dolls and spying on ex-girlfriends than it is with politics.

So if it does happen that Vince Fumo ends his career labeled a crook, it might not surprise too many people. But who ever could have imagined this: that Vince Fumo would end his career as...a laughingstock?