[Updated: With the proper use of “lying.”] With everything going on in the world you can be forgiven if you haven’t paid a lot of attention to … South Dakota. I mean, to most of us it’s just that big flat place “over there”. A place where unless you’re counting pheasants and super spreader motorcycle rallies nothing much ever happens.

But then you get a story like the one where the state’s top law enforcement officer — protecting and serving, y’know — kills a guy with his car — and given the place’s 90% Republican control, gets off with a hand-slap, essentially Scot-free, at least until he doesn’t.

Yesterday the South Dakota legislature finally summoned the courage to impeach Attorney General Jason Ravnsborg for, A: Killing 55 year-old Joe Boever by hitting him as he walked alongside a rural highway, and then B: Flagrantly lying about it, claiming he thought Boever, a guy whose head came through Ravnsborg’s windshield, was a deer.

The story has played here in Minnesota and nationally, but usually without the telling details, some of which were only partly known until the full North Dakota BCI report was released several weeks ago. (The incident took place Sept. 12, 2020.) Having already established that the dead man’s glasses were lying on the passenger seat of Ravnsborg’s car, thereby making it, well, pretty damned unlikely the Attorney General didn’t know he’d hit a human being, the report revealed that far from Boever walking on the road, Ravnsborg — a guy who at at age 46 has already accumulated 25 traffic citations — was completely off the road, as in his entire car, a full-size Ford, was on the other side of the rumble strips and fog lines, practicaly in the ditch, when he hit Boever, who was carrying a flashlight, so hard Boever’s head not only came through the windshield but one of his legs was torn completely off.

And about that flashlight … . A local sheriff rolled out to the scene in response to Ravnsborg calling in a report of hitting a deer, (something you have to do for insurance reasons). Neither of them bothered to check around for the deer. So neither noticed the light from the flashlight lying in the ditch back near the point of impact. (The car – traveling at 68 mph — carried Boever about 100 feet before throwing him off.) When Ravnsborg and other cops returned to the scene the next day and found Boever’s body, the flashlight was still on.

So much for thorough law enforcement work.

So now Ravnsborg will face a Senate trial that like — pick your Trump impeachment — requires a 2/3 vote to convict. How that goes is anyone’s guess. But — and here we get into more wildly dysfunctional, contemporary South Dakota politics — he does not have friends in high places. You see, Ravnsborg is in a death match feud with South Dakota’s “presidential contender” governor, former beauty queen Kristi Noem. She wants him gone real bad, and right now, she carries more water in South Dakota than he does.

Noem needs far less introduction than Ravnsborg. She is best known to anyone with a conscience as the appalling Trumpist politician who so resolutely denied COVID that South Dakota for a time (around when Ravnsborg killed Boever) had the highest death rate per capita of any place in the world.

For her brave stand for “personal freedoms” Noem became a darling of FoxNews and was catapulted into the pantheon of self-serving gargoyles considered suitable successors to the Trump mantle. (Semi-notorious Trump “adviser” Corey Lewandowski has become a, mmm, regular traveling companion as Noem makes the required CPAC/Trump rally circuit of activities having nothing to do with responsibly governing South Dakota.)

I could go on about Noem’s scandal-ette over big-footing her daughter’s real estate license, then pushing out the bureaucrat who denied it, and the $400,000 fence she had put up around the Governor’s residence (with no hint at all of any unique threat to her), or the constant use of state aircraft to get her and Lewandowski to MAGA rallies. But, in the annals of South Dakota today there’s something better … but far more opaque.

With all the news about sanctions on Russian oligarchs, seizing their super yachts and chasing their extremely murky finances all over the planet, it’s worth noting that flat, boring South Dakota is today a rival to Switzerland when it comes to — let’s call it what it is — hiding money.

Back in the ’80s another Republican governor, Bill Janklow, yet another Republican politician with a notorious driving record — 13 citations — and a guy who while speeding killed a Minnesota motorcyclist on a South Dakota highway, opened the doors to the industry of remarkably air-and-light tight trusts. Over the last ten years alone, as every millionaire-billionaire with a reason to hide money has set up such “legitimate financial tools” the amount of cash stashed in South Dakota has risen seven-fold, from $50 billion to $355 billion as of late 2020.

That’s a third of a trillion dollars protected from prying eyes and taxes by … South Dakota.

How much of those billions is utterly nefarious, maybe even from Russian mobsters? No one knows and South Dakota certainly isn’t going to do anything to make it easier for investigators to find out. (Amazingly South Dakota — tough negotiators over there — doesn’t get even the tiniest of a percentage of a taste for hiding all that loot.)

It almost goes without saying that aggressive journalism is a deeply endangered species in full-on, proudly red and merrily Trumpian South Dakota of 2022. But there are a few brave souls doing what they can.

South Dakota’s descent into The Alabama of the Midwest was taking root back when Tom Daschle was a top Democrat. But I can only imagine what George McGovern and James Abourezk think of their once dull, fly-over home state?

As for us here in Minnesota, thank god we’ve got Wisconsin.