Rack up another first for Kathleen Kane.
The star of the 'Kane Scrutiny' was widely hailed as a rising star in the Democratic Party after becoming the first woman - and first Democrat - elected to be Pennsylvania's top law enforcer.
Now she's also the first woman and first Democrat to be convicted for her actions as attorney general.
It took a jury just four and a half hours last night to convict Kane on all charges, including perjury and obstruction. She's vowing to appeal. That did not stop the calls - including from the state's Democratic governor - that she step down immediately.
Her top aide, former Montgomery County District Attorney Bruce Castor, who she hired to be her second in command after it became clear that she would face trial, has scheduled a 1 p.m. press conference to discuss her status.
Kane consistently tried to explain her actions as the result of some kind of conspiracy to keep her from releasing a treasure trove of pornographic emails that apparently were part and parcel of the A.G.'s office before she arrived. They were discovered during her investigation of how her predecessor handled the investigation into Jerry Sandusky child sexual abuse scandal at Penn State.
The jury saw through that charade and concurred with prosecutors who simply painted her as a woman scorned, seeking revenge on a former co-worker who she blamed for an unflattering story about her.
It was not the first misstep by Kane, but surely it was the one that sealed her fate.
She campaigned and won office largely on a promise to dig into how then-Attorney General and then Gov. Tom Corbett's office handled the Sandusky affair. It took a couple of years but a special panel concluded there was no effort by Corbett or others in his office to delay the investigation.
Then the new attorney general proclaimed she would not defend the state's Defense of Marriage Act. Apparently she must have believed she also was elected to the bench, deciding unilaterally that she would decide which laws she would enforce and which she would simply ignore.
But it was her actions to seek a pound of flesh against former lead state prosecutor Frank Fina that finally deposited her on the other side of the law.
She leaked information to a newspaper reporter in an effort to make Fina look bad.
The she doubled down by lying to the grand jury about it, and trying to cover it up. All the while she managed to titillate the state with her stories of the pornographic emails.
But the final chapter is that the state's sitting attorney general is now a convicted criminal. The jury returned guilty verdicts on all nine counts against her, including perjury, obstructing administration of law, official oppression, false wearing and conspiracy.
The curtain has come down on The Kane Scrutiny, and what was once a promising political career.
Hell may have no fury as a woman scorned. But Kathleen Kane has learned that a woman blindly seeking revenge, described as 'unhinged' by her co-workers, soon becomes a woman convicted.
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