Part of the peevishness of Podunk stems from the fact that we are aware of our lack of importance on the world’s great stage. We rarely produce presidents, titans of industry, cutting edge innovator, and if we do they move away. Nor do we wield economic or cultural power.

Once every few years, if there’s a contested primary, the caravan rolls through but soon is gone. Once in a while we send a major league embarrassment to Congress or figure in a notorious court case involving civil rights, environmental degradation, or gerrymandering, The rest is silence, except for ACC basketball.

But all of a sudden, the Junior Senator from the great state of North Carolina, Thom Tillis, has been sideswiped by history, earning him his fifteen minutes of infamy. Tillis was the Speaker of the NC House and as such the tool of the Art Pope machine, the local arm of the libertarian Koch cabal. As speaker his major accomplishment was to slash education spending in a state already 39th in the nation.

Then he ran for Senate in 2014 and was elected over Democratic incumbent Kay Hagan by 50,000 votes out of 2,915,000 cast. She led until the final weeks. What happened? A post mortem by “Roll Call” purported to explain how Tillis beat “One of 2014’s Best Campaign’s.” The answer was, by doing what yokels in Podunk do, outsourcing his campaign to the big city boys.

So Tillis, having been vetted by the machine, soon had a campaign well-funded and managed by the machine, including Crossroads GPS. It is Karl Rove’s dark money front allowing conservative donors to hide their identity. In 2014, it spent $26 million to elect Republicans in just six states.

As “Roll Call” reported, Tillis also got money from the Republican Party, desperate to gain the five seats needed to win control of the Senate. As the election neared, Obama’s poll numbers were down due to an Ebola scare and an Isis atrocity. Advertising for Tillis hung those issues around the neck of Hagan.

This account of the winning strategy is true, as far as it goes, but now we’ve begun to learn, as Paul Harvey used to say, the rest of the story. The first hint that something was hinky came when Tillis, normally all but invisible, began to pop up in the news.

As senator his role has been largely to apologize for Trump’s incompetence and transgressions. When Trump said we should confiscate guns first and worry about due process later, Tillis said he didn’t believe “in my heart of hearts that’s exactly what he meant.” On other occasions he excused Trump craziness by saying he’s “not a legal scholar” or “was not really up to speed” on some policy. You think?

More interesting is his recent execution of the very rare double flip-flop. Last summer he tried to act like a purple state senator by co-sponsoring with Democrat Chris Coons a bill to codify Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s independence and immunity to firing.

In January, however, he backed off when real threats against Mueller began to emanate from the White House. Clearly Tillis didn’t want to be on the other side of a constitutional struggle from his President, his party, and his donors. But then a week or two ago, he flipped back and began pushing for the protection of Mueller again. Why?

Could it be because Tillis knew he was about to become news in a very dangerous way, as a beneficiary of the Russian-Cambridge Analytica-Facebook-Bannon-Mercer, election-theft apparatus? He was suddenly anxious to look like he was all for Mueller getting to the bottom of things, rather than look like he was trying to cover up the fact that he was one more politician who owed his victory to a cabal of tech oligarchs, or Vladimir Putin.

Turns out the money behind his 2014 win came not just from the national Republican slush fund and the Crossroads dark money pit, but from the super PAC of John Bolton. He’s the foreign policy extremist who is about to become Trump’s NSC director. Or was, until the facts about his PAC became public. Bolton may now be in trouble, and Tillis is getting splashed with the mud.

Bolton’s PAC was largely funded by the anti-government billionaire Robert Mercer who also controlled the Steve Bannon-run Cambridge Analytica. It used an app devised by a Russian to weaponize Facebook data to tilt the 2016 election for Trump and against Clinton.

This nefarious scheme got its trial run in 2014 when, according to reporting by the “New York Times,” “using psychographic models, Cambridge helped design concepts for advertising for candidates supported by Mr. Bolton’s PAC, including the 2014 campaign of Thom Tillis.” Oops! So, the Bolton PAC, funded with Mercer money, hired the Mercer-owned Cambridge to get the Mercers (and possibly the Russians) the Senate they wanted.

If voters had known who was really manipulating the election, would they have cast the same votes? Without Bolton, Cambridge, Mercer, and Putin, would Trump be President? Would Tillis be Senator? And do we now know the full extent of the corruption? Or are we all in the same position as the cheated lover in the old Eddy Arnold song who lamented, “How many, how many, I wonder, but I really don’t want to know?”