by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR

Somebody e-mailed me five naked photos of a city councillor this week.

(Leads like that make this the only paper you can't put down, although technically those cone-shaped paper cups with the pointy bottoms are pretty hard to put down too.)

Anyway, the city councillor in question hasn't actually done much councilloring in the last few years and the photos don't look all that recent either, but there he is, standing next to his silver Christmas tree dancing with headphones on. Another shows him next to an old solid-state TV, and yeah, he's in a pretty solid state too, it seems.

I got the photos from two women whom the cad had been flirting with online earlier this year. One is a 43-year-old divorcée in Fresno, California, and the other is a 42 year old from Calgary. Hell hath no fury like an Internet chat-room partner scorned.

I won't say the name of the former city councillor because of a possibly misbegotten sense of solidarity with people who send nude photos of themselves to others.

"I met him in April," says the Calgary paramour. "I posted an ad on a singles site, without a photo of myself and he immediately wrote me seven messages. I decided not to write him back, but he was so persistent and such a smooth talker." She eventually agreed to visit the old country with him and passed through town, only to discover that his claims of grandeur were greatly exaggerated.

Sometime during the progression of this sequence of events the smooth-talking, civic-minded Montrealer made the mistake of sending a romantic note meant for the Calgary woman to the Fresno woman.

The two women realized his two-timing ruse and united. They decided that this famous Montrealer - they thought he was pretty famous anyway - had to be outed.

But what was his crime? "He said his nephew was on life support for thrombosis and the family has run up $370,000 in medical bills. I researched and found out it wasn't possible," says one. "But he's good at yapping."

The crafty former elected official also had some grand schemes, according to the bean-spilling former lover. "He said we'd work on the Paul Martin campaign, and then get Martin to loan us several million dollars for a business and we'd claim bankruptcy after a year or two and move back to Europe. I later figured that had I gone along, I would have been left behind to take the rap for him."

The city councillor's litany of other sins includes charges that he's shorter than he let on, he exaggerated his wealth, gave a fake story to explain his absence as he travelled with the other woman, asked them to send him photos of their shaved bodies and permanently borrowed $1,500 worth of supplies from one of them for their trip together.

You know, the usual stuff that guys do.

The more I heard the women explain the tale, the more I started identifying with the bad guy in this story.

I begrudgingly like fraud artists. I particularly admire the ones who bilk crazy old people by appealing to their greed. What initiative, nerve and imagination! Besides, if every man moaned - as these women did - about wasting money on a botched romantic partner, well, that's all you'd ever hear.

And, the pressure to conform can be so crushing. This week our mayor denounced a middle-aged, middle-class West Island woman running for election because she is - according to him - insufficiently bilingual. When the big bosses are trying to run the middle-of-the-road people out of the electoral process, you've got to wonder about the space we allot in the public arena for the circus freaks that give the world its colour.

I hope that the naked city councillor one day runs again for public office. I have a great idea for a picture for his campaign poster.

Comments? kgravy@openface.ca