Just five days before last November’s elections, this was the lead editorial from the Wall Street Journal:

So, less than a week before the midterm elections, four workers from Acorn, the liberal activist group that has registered millions of voters, have been indicted by a federal grand jury for submitting false voter registration forms to the Kansas City, Missouri, election board.... We wish this were an aberration, but allegations of fraud have tainted Acorn voter drives across the country. Acorn workers have been convicted in Wisconsin and Colorado, and investigations are still under way in Ohio, Tennessee and Pennsylvania.

The good news for anyone who cares about voter integrity is that the Justice Department finally seems poised to connect these dots instead of dismissing such revelations as the work of a few yahoos. After the federal indictments were handed up in Kansas City this week, the U.S. Attorney’s office said in a statement that “This national investigation is very much ongoing.”

It sounded like a serious voter-fraud crisis. After all, the Justice Department has a long-standing policy of avoiding election law prosecutions immediately before voters head to the polls, so for these indictments to come down with less than a week before the midterms, there had to be some serious wrongdoing. And if so, it made some sense for the right-wing WSJ editorial page to gloat about it.

What we didn’t know at the time, however, was the truth. Bradley Schlozman — the former U.S. Attorney for Kansas City and controversial deputy head at the Civil Rights Division — appears to have rushed these ACORN indictments for maximum political benefit.