Moments after his client had been sentenced for pilfering money intended to help poor people escape addiction, attorney Joe Cheshire V said former U.S. Congressman Frank Ballance ”raised himself up by his bootstraps and did more to help the poor people of North Carolina than any person I know.“

Chesire didn't mention the help Ballance provided family members, friends and his church - all courtesy of taxpayers.

Ballance, a Democrat who once represented the 1st Congressional District, last year agreed to a plea bargain in which he pled guilty to conspiring to commit mail fraud and launder money. His exact crime was diverting some of the $2.3 million of state money that went to the John A. Hyman Memorial Foundation between 1994 and 2003 for more personal causes - a $15,500 legal bill, $69,000 to pay rent for his church, $20,000 toward a Lincoln Navigator for his son; $5,000 to his daughter for computer services she didn't perform; and $143,250 he shared with his mother to pay for community programs.

Ballance's scheme came tumbling down after Hal Sharpe, a Lumberton native who was editor of the Littleton Observer, pursued a story about the foundation's good work and found out that none was being done.

After Ballance was sentenced to four years in prison on Wednesday, he immediately criticized the prosecution for its aggressiveness - and denied the charge of money laundering he had pled guilty to.

His son, Garey Ballance, a District Court judge, had pleaded guilty in April to a federal misdemeanor charge of failing to file an income tax return and was sentenced Wednesday to nine months in prison and fined $5,000. He blamed the Republican Party for his travails.

Frank Ballance's crime is worse than the typical white-collar offense. As a public servant, he had the responsibility to take care of tax dollars, not steal them for personal gain. Further, the money he diverted didn't go to the Hyman Foundation's stated mission - helping poor people mired in drug and alcohol addiction - and could complicate future efforts by sincere nonprofits to secure government grants for noble causes.

But there might be an happy consequence of Ballance's misdeeds. We know that state Auditor Les Merritt used the Ballance fiasco to remind nonprofits to keep the I's dotted and the T's crossed. Hopefully that hammer over the head will prevent other caretakers of tax dollars from acting as arrogantly and criminally as did Frank Ballance.