roy moore

Roy Moore will speak in Huntsville on Thursday at a Republican gala. (Julie Bennett/jbennett@al.com)

You can get away with a lot of things, up to and perhaps including murder, before you mess with the government's money.

State Rep. Oliver Robinson learned that lesson the hard way after turning his nonprofit into a stream of personal income.

And, Roy Moore better be careful, or he might learn it, too.

While Moore has told America to get right with God, his foundation has gotten crosswise with the IRS, underreporting money paid to him and his wife.

During the GOP primary for this year's special election for United States Senate, Moore's opponent, Sen. Luther Strange, blasted Moore and his wife for using Moore's nonprofit, the Foundation for Moral Law, as a family milk cow.

In one attack ad, the Mitch McConnell-aligned Super PAC, the Senate Leadership Fund, said Moore and his wife took more than $1 million from the nonprofit.

But if Moore was using the nonprofit as a milk cow, Strange and his pals hadn't found all of its udders.

On Wednesday, a Washington Post investigation revealed that internal documents from the Foundation for Moral Law and the nonprofit's public tax records don't match up, and despite denials by Moore, the former Alabama Chief Justice had been receiving regular compensation from the nonprofit.

"[P]rivately, Moore had arranged to receive a salary of $180,000 a year for part-time work at the Foundation for Moral Law, internal charity documents show," the Post reported. "He collected more than $1 million as president from 2007 to 2012, compensation that far surpassed what the group disclosed in its public tax filings most of those years."

And that's in addition to salary his wife, Kayla Moore, drew after she took over as the nonprofit's executive director, and also money paid to two of the Moores' children.

The foundation has also had other tax problems.

And last month, the Daily Beast reported that numbers on the Foundation for Moral Law's tax returns didn't match income the Moores reported to the Alabama Ethics Commission.

In those ethics forms, Moore showed that his wife took $65,000 in salary from the Foundation for Moral Law, but that salary was not reported to the IRS in the nonprofit's tax filings.

Moore's campaign claimed that the 2014 tax records had been fabricated.

If that's the case, the Moore campaign should hunt down the fabricator and thank them. You see, as AL.com's Christopher Harress reported earlier this year, the foundation had not filed its last two tax returns.

Nothing for 2015.

Nothing for 2016.

Maybe Donald Trump set some sort of precedent by not releasing his tax returns when he ran for president, but at least he sent them to the IRS.

When Harress asked the foundation why it was so late filing those taxes, an employee there told him that the organization's accountant had gotten sick and almost died.

But the Post's investigation could have revealed another explanation -- the IRS had audited the nonprofit's 2013 returns and said that the Foundation for Moral Law as in danger of losing its tax exempt status if it doesn't resolve problems with how the nonprofit is run.

But worst of all, the paper trail the Post discovered tells a story, and it's a story Alabamians should pay attention to.

All this time, when Roy Moore was fighting his supposed crusades to bring religion back into courthouses, when he turned church sanctuaries into political soapboxes, when he turned Alabama into a joke for late night talk shows -- he wasn't doing it for some higher purpose.

He was doing it to get paid.

When the foundation ran low on funds, Moore didn't donate his own compensation to the cause. When it couldn't afford to pay him in cash, it gave him a promissory note backed by its real estate holdings.

Jesus said render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's. Moore had his foundation render unto him.

When they didn't have enough, he didn't tell them, "Thanks, but keep it." The foundation had to dig deeper.

Moore, it's now clear, is a man of principal, not principle.

He was in it for gold, not God.

Kyle Whitmire is the state political columnist for the Alabama Media Group. You can follow his work on Facebook through Reckon by AL.com.