Afterward, Mr. Williamson, a retired sheet metal mechanic and archery coach, washed his hands of local politics. He has gone to only one council meeting since then — it was a special meeting about road paving — and he has largely stopped monitoring the political minutiae of the city of about 2,300 people.

Often, mayors facing impeachment resign before the City Council takes formal action against them — either succumbing to public pressure, as Baltimore’s mayor did this year, or as part of a plea agreement with prosecutors, like the one Nashville’s mayor accepted last year.

When scandals do result in impeachment, the hearings can be difficult for local officials to navigate, given that there is no standard procedure that spans the more than 19,000 municipal governments in the United States, according to Kimberly Nelson, a professor of public administration at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

“When officials are removed at a local level, sometimes it’s petty and sometimes it’s serious,” Professor Nelson said. “It may be because they’ve committed a crime, or because they’re making it impossible to function.”

Sometimes impeachment does not scuttle a mayor’s prospects at all, proving that there can be political life — and even re-election — after rivals seek to have leaders removed from office.

Diana Broderson took the mantle as mayor of Muscatine, Iowa, in January 2016, having never held political office before. A year into her term, the City Council began accusing her of exceeding her authority, and it unanimously voted to impeach her in May 2017.