The Republican primary fight I wrote about in the June 2 TAC is heating up on election eve. Tomorrow GOP voters in Virginia’s 8th Congressional District will pick between Ron Paul-endorsed candidate Amit Singh and compassionate conservative Mark Ellmore, and the mud is now flying thick and fast. On Saturday, the Washington Post ran a story about a misleading attack flier put out by the Ellmore people; the flier sourced to the Post quotes that were actually written by the campaign, as the paper reports:

The flier, which hit some mailboxes Friday, attributes the following photo caption to The Post: “Amit Singh with his political mentor Libertarian Ron Paul, who reportedly has plans to disrupt the Republican Convention in Minneapolis.” Those words never appeared in the newspaper or as a quote elsewhere, and the photograph was not taken by The Post.

Naturally, the Singh campaign has made hay out of this. Ellmore’s people, meanwhile, are hammering away at the idea that Singh is not a loyal Republican, pointing out that he didn’t vote for George Allen in ’06 and claiming (without attribution, so take it with a shaker of salt) that Singh referred to Jim Gilmore, this year’s Republican Senate nominee, as a “police statist neocon.” “Shouldn’t our 8th District Republican Congressional candidate be able to get along with his running mates John McCain and Jim Gilmore?” asks Ellmore campaign manager Daniel Tillson. Singh, for his part, has recorded a YouTube message taking aim at Elmore’s assertions.

In my TAC piece, I quoted a local paper, the Arlington Connection, speculating that Ellmore lost his first bid for the Republican nomination in ’06 because he reached out too far beyond the GOP base. His approach this time, portraying himself as a Republican stalwart, suggests he agrees with that analysis, though not everyone does. I caught flack from one Republican activist for citing the Arlington Connection‘s interpretation — he said Ellmore didn’t lose in ’06 because he reached out to non-Republicans (Virginia has an open primary, after all), but because “Mark Ellmore is an a**hole.”