A few years ago, Terry Ganey let me in on a secret.

It was the last day of the Missouri Legislature’s 2010 session, and we were having a beer on the patio of Paddy Malone’s pub in Jefferson City.

Ganey, a fixture in the Capitol for years, first as the Post-Dispatch Capitol bureau chief and later as a reporter for the Columbia Tribune, was hanging it up.

Over the past several years, covering the Legislature, and particularly the Republicans who ran the place, required a certain amount of what in literary circles is called suspension of disbelief. As the GOP drifted further to the right and endorsed various conspiracy theories, it became more and more difficult to cover smart, reasonable people pretending to believe things that you knew deep down they couldn’t possibly believe.

Ganey just couldn’t take it anymore.