toledoblade.com --

John McCain's reputation as a straight talker exposed a timely bit of political irony as the Arizona senator came to Ohio to campaign for the re-election of Sen. Mike DeWine.

Instead of simply extolling the virtues of his Republican colleague, Mr. McCain inadvertently provided Ohioans with a reason not to support Mr. DeWine in his unexpectedly close contest with U.S. Rep. Sherrod Brown.

Coming down hard on President Bush's mishandling of the war in Iraq, Mr. McCain made headlines by casting doubt on the judgment of reliable supporters of the President on the war, Mr. DeWine being a prime example.

Now that chaos reigns and civil war appears imminent, Mr. DeWine recently has been tip-toeing away from the Iraq imbroglio, hoping voters won't recall his down-the-line backing of the administration on the war over the past four years.

But readers of The Blade have only to return to Feb. 12, 2002, when Mr. DeWine, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, was touring Toledo Children's Hospital on the eve of the investigation into the circumstances of the 9/11 attacks.

Mr. DeWine said then that he was satisfied that the Bush Administration was providing Congress adequate intelligence information on the war against terrorists, and that it seemed appropriate to target Iran, Iraq, and North Korea - countries the President called an "axis of evil" in his State of the Union speech - in efforts to prevent terror attacks on America.

"These are countries that are developing chemical, biological, and maybe nuclear weapons,' he said then. "Our fear is that they might use them against U.S. citizens or against the United States."

Mr. Dewine said that the war on terror could not be considered won until Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was toppled.

If that rationale sounds familiar, it's because Mr. DeWine was parroting the administration line - claims that Mr. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, and others haven't abandoned to this day, even though they've been thoroughly discredited.

What makes all this ironic is Mr. McCain's statement this week that one of the biggest mistakes the administration and its supporters made was "underestimating the size of the task and the sacrifices that would be required" in Iraq and soft-peddling the task ahead.

Such talk, he added, "has contributed enormously to the frustration that Americans feel today because they were led to believe this could be some kind of day at the beach, which many of us fully understood would be a very, very difficult undertaking."

Does Mr. McCain's revealing soliloquy indicate that Mike DeWine, the reliable war supporter now masquerading as a dove, shouldn't be re-elected? Not necessarily. Mr. Brown still needs to make the case that he is a better alternative.

But the episode does illustrate once again how blind political allegiance rather than rational judgment could help lead the nation into one of the biggest policy blunders since the Vietnam War.