Michael Kiefer

The Republic | azcentral.com

Joe Arpaio treated the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office as if it were a lifetime appointment. And, indeed, he spent nine lives there — until Tuesday, Nov. 8, when he lost to former Phoenix Police Sgt. Paul Penzone, who'd nearly unseated him in 2012.

During his first decade in office, Arpaio was an unlikely king-maker, with Republican candidates vying to get his endorsement.

He charmed the public with his tough-guy persona, his uncomplicated solutions to crime and immigration, his slogans, and his boundless blue-collar charisma.

He amused America with pink underwear and green baloney for those in his jails.

“Jail is not a country club,” he said when he sent inmates to live in Army surplus tents or to do road work on chain gangs.

Though his chief responsibility was maintaining the county jails and ensuring that inmates got to court, he convinced an adoring public that he was also the front-line defense against illegal immigration from Mexico. At the same time, as investigations and lawsuits would later conclude, his office was flagging at its actual duties.

Arrest warrants went unserved. Sexual assaults went uninvestigated. Prisoners were kept from court.

In the end, Arpaio clung to the coattails of Donald Trump, who in many ways was successfully riding the same anti-immigration wave that Arpaio rode to national prominence between 2005 and 2012. But in Arpaio’s case, the wave broke.

As in most relationships, the things that drew voters to him may have been the very things that made them turn away: His old-fashioned take on law enforcement, his quirky personality and gimmicks, his unrelenting stance on illegal immigration, his scorn for the federal government, where he had worked for decades.

Those things appealed to senior citizens and conservative voters, and brought him national press. But eventually they dragged him down.

His leads on successive election nights were diminishing steadily, from 66 percent in 2000 to 57 percent in 2004, to 55 percent in 2008, to 50.7 percent in 2012. That last time, he narrowly squeaked by Penzone.

On Tuesday night, he lost to the same challenger.

Though Trump was able to rally this election cycle's voters behind his anti-immigrant message, the voters of Maricopa County had already been down that road — at great expense.

Maricopa County Sheriff's Office employees react to Joe Arpaio's defeat

Between 2005 and 2010, Arpaio, former Maricopa County Attorney Andrew Thomas and former state Senate President Russell Pearce collaborated to crack down on illegal immigration with state statutes that targeted immigrants and denied them bond when they were arrested. In 2010, then-Gov. Jan Brewer signed into law the most controversial law of all, omnibus Senate Bill 1070. Among other things, it required law enforcement officers in Arizona to verify the immigration status of anyone they suspected of being in the country illegally.

But SB 1070 was invalidated by the federal courts. By this year, nearly all of the state's immigration laws had been found unconstitutional and preempted by federal immigration law.

That didn’t stop Arpaio. He continued to try to enforce immigration laws. Meanwhile, his office repeatedly investigated arch-conservatives' theories that President Barack Obama was born overseas, a notion that even Trump eventually abandoned.

MORE: How Arizona became ground zero for the 'birther' movement

Arpaio’s latest political ads blamed Obama for targeting him in federal court.

But in fact, the last time Arpaio came under federal investigation, it was from the U.S. Department of Justice under former President George W. Bush. Four years later, in 2012, the U.S. Attorney for Arizona decided not to press abuse-of-power charges against Arpaio and his co-conspirator, Thomas, accusing them of arresting, indicting and suing judges and county officials they saw as political enemies.

Thomas was disbarred for his actions. Arpaio’s second-in-command was fired. Pearce was recalled from the Arizona Legislature. But Arpaio escaped and was re-elected, even though his prosecutions of other county officials cost the taxpayers millions in court awards and settlements. At last count, the cost was more than $140 million over his 24 years in office.

Now, Arpaio faces a criminal contempt-of-court charge that did not come from the Justice Department, but from a Republican-appointed federal judge. Arpaio angered the judge by ignoring a court order to stop enforcing state immigration laws, and by investigating the same judge and his wife in the midst of the racial-profiling case.

Arpaio already has been found in civil contempt of court in the case, putting taxpayers on the hook for $500,000 for a victims’ compensation fund.

If Arpaio now goes to trial for criminal contempt of court, the judge handling that case has already said that the most severe punishment he could receive is six months in jail — the equivalent of a misdemeanor. And few people actually go to jail for misdemeanors.

A finding of criminal contempt would not have kept Arpaio from holding office. But that was instead decided Tuesday by voters.

Last year, the public-relations guru Jason Rose, Arpaio's friend, told The Arizona Republic, “It’s the exception, not the rule, that elected officials go out on their own terms.”

According to one rumor, Arpaio had hoped to go out on his own terms: Get re-elected, then retire after a few months and leave the office in the care of a hand-picked successor.

But Rose had also cautioned, “There’s a statute of limitations on electability.”

On Tuesday, it ran on Joe Arpaio.

Maricopa County Sheriff's Office employees react to Joe Arpaio's defeat

Joe Arpaio no longer 'America's Toughest Sheriff'

Sheriff Joe Arpaio has always done it his way