Well this is just great.

A few weeks ago, when S. Donald Sussman signed on as 75 percent owner of this newspaper, I resolved to write about his wife, U.S. Rep. Chellie Pingree, only when absolutely necessary.

Meaning it had to be something big, something startling, something completely outside the box to get me to even go there.

And now this.

Congresswoman Pingree, according to one of her colleagues, is a Communist.

Who knew?

Rep. Allen West, that’s who. He’s a Republican from Florida, where Tuesday evening he fielded what he called a “good question” from a constituent at a town-hall campaign event.

How many members of Congress, the gentleman in the audience wanted to know, are “card-carrying Marxists?”

Responded West, “I believe that there’s about 78 to 81 members of the Democratic Party that are members of the Communist Party.”

Pressed later by a reporter to name names, West declined. But he did point to the 76-member Congressional Progressive Caucus, in which Pingree is one of five vice chairs.

Seriously? Communists every one?

“That’s what I’ve heard,” West told the reporter.

Meaning West, who got into hot water while serving as an Army colonel in Iraq (he fired his pistol next to the head of an Iraqi detainee to extract information that later turned out to be fabricated), actually has no idea what he’s talking about.

Still, his shoot-from-the-hip accusation harkens back to a dark era in American politics when another member of Congress with a volcano between his shoulders slapped the “commie” label on fellow politicians, actors, writers, labor leaders and anyone else who didn’t suit his fancy — and in the process ruined many a life.

His name, of course, was Sen. Joseph McCarthy, the acid-tongued Republican from Wisconsin and father of the now infamous “Red Scare” that swept the nation during the early 1950s.

McCarthy’s career ended with widespread denunciation and disgrace in 1954 after his colleagues wised up to what he was doing and, quite fittingly, condemned him for bringing “dishonor and disrepute” to the Senate. And much of the credit for that goes to none other than Sen. Margaret Chase Smith, the legendary Republican from Maine.

Smith made national headlines on June 1, 1950, when she rose in the Senate chamber and delivered her signature “Declaration of Conscience” speech — a thinly veiled rejection of McCarthy’s “character assassination sheltered by the shield of congressional immunity.”

It remains, to this day, one of Maine’s finest hours.

“Those of us who shout the loudest about Americanism in making character assassination are all too frequently those who, by our own acts, ignore some of the basic principles of Americanism: the right to criticize, the right to hold unpopular beliefs, the right to protest, the right of independent thought,” declared Smith.

Make no mistake about it, Smith was not shy about criticizing then-President Harry Truman, a Democrat, who in her view had “pitifully failed to provide effective leadership.”

And she stuck to her partisan guns as she looked ahead to the 1952 presidential election, insisting “that it is time for a change and that a Republican victory is necessary to the security of this country.”

But the tactics employed by McCarthy — whom she never mentioned by name — were “equally disastrous” to any Democratic shortcomings, Smith observed.

“The nation sorely needs a Republican victory,” she said. “But I don’t want to see the Republican Party ride to victory on the Four Horsemen of Calumny — fear, ignorance, bigotry and smear.”

(The Four Horsemen of Calumny. Oh for the days when our political leaders expressed themselves not with monotonic sound bites, but rather with rich, vibrant vocabularies.)

Asked Thursday for her reaction to congressman West’s claim that she’s a Communist, Pingree said in a prepared statement, “This is an unfortunate reflection of the state of politics today and makes you wish Margaret Chase Smith was still around.”

Yes … and no.

For all her backbone and eloquence, I shudder to think what might become of Smith — who was 97 when she died peacefully in 1995 at her home in Skowhegan — if she were practicing politics today.

Take, for example, this line from her speech: “I don’t like the way the Senate has been made a rendezvous for vilification, for selfish political gain at the sacrifice of individual reputations and national unity.”

These days, talk like that quickly earns a Republican the “RINO” label — shorthand among hard-core conservatives for “Republican In Name Only.” Just ask outgoing Sen. Olympia Snowe, whose attempts to reach across the aisle made her a tea party target at more than one Maine Republican caucus in February.

Or better yet, ask Sen. Susan Collins, who often cites Smith as her role model, how a “Declaration of Conscience” speech might fly today.

Would Collins dare deliver it? And if so, would it enjoy the same acclaim that Smith’s did more than a half-century ago?

My guess is no.

My guess is that the moment Collins or anyone else in the Republican Party had the audacity to do such a thing, someone like the wild, wild congressman West would come along and try to burn her at the rhetorical stake.

Truth be told, Chellie Pingree, like so many of those who found themselves in McCarthy’s cross hairs so many years ago, is no Communist.

And even in this blood sport that now passes for politics, it’s hard not to chuckle that someone like West would reach so far back for an “insult” that all but evaporated with the end of the Cold War in 1991.

But what goes around, as the saying goes, comes around. And as comical as West might sound calling his own colleagues “Communists,” we laugh him off at our peril.

Yes, such talk is idiotic.

But yes, as Margaret Chase Smith once had the courage to say, it is also dangerous. 

Columnist Bill Nemitz can be contacted at 791-6323 or at:

bnemitz@mainetoday.com