Gov. Rick Scott’s life story, as he often tells it, is of rags to riches. When he was in high school, the family lived for a time in public housing. He’s now Florida’s wealthiest governor and would be among the most affluent members of the U.S. Senate if he defeats incumbent Democrat Bill Nelson.

As we have said, Nelson deserves to be re-elected because he has earned the office and Scott hasn’t.

The governor’s most consequential decisions — to reject President Obama’s Medicaid expansion and a fully-funded high-speed rail project — were partisan and bad for the people of Florida. The algae blooms that kill fish, choke people and depress tourism are the price of his willful neglect of the environment. Lives have been lost because of his indifferent oversight of the departments of family services and corrections. The Sun Pass toll collection fiasco was on his watch, and a conflict of interest.

Even if none of that were weighting the ledger, the contest between Nelson and Scott would still be unequal on the issue of character, which ought to be paramount in judging whether someone deserves the people’s trust.

Nelson has been scandal-free, Scott not so. How he became wealthy and what’s he done with the money are significant issues for the voters.

His biography boasts of building what became Columbia/HCA into “one of the most admired companies in America.” But when he was forced out by the company’s board in 1997, it was one of the most despised companies in America, ultimately paying $1.7 billion in fines and penalties — a record at the time — for defrauding Medicare.

Scott claimed to have not known of the systematic fraud. In an unrelated civil suit, he claimed the Fifth Amendment 75 times during a deposition. In saving the company, the new management abolished high-pressure performance metrics, such as a monthly increase in surgeries.

Scott left with a generous severance package, including stock options that contributed to his wealth and to his lavish expenditures in winning the governor’s office in 2010. After spending some $60 million from his own pocket, he had plenty left on taking office. He and his wife are now worth between $254 million and $510 million, according to federal records. He has made at least $200 million from investments during his time in office.

To deflect suspicion of conflicts of interest, the governor created what he called a blind trust that supposedly would conceal even from him how his money was being invested. The Legislature played along, belatedly ratifying the arrangement as satisfying Florida law against conflicts of interest.

But the legislation, which Scott signed, is a fraud. Unlike federal law, it doesn’t require an officeholder to place his money with a disinterested and completely independent trustee. Scott’s trustee is Alan Bazaar, who worked for the governor’s investment company for 11 years and whose firm also manages the private investments held by or on behalf of his wife, Ann.

In practice, the trust has been “blind in name only,” as the New York Times described it. There have been an astonishing series of comparable investments by the governor’s trust and by his wife.

Some were revealed when Scott briefly opened up the blind trust and others were deduced from SEC filings. The full extent, however, has come to light only because federal law required Scott to disclose his wife’s investments along with his own when he filed to run for the Senate.

The latest disclosure, by the Tampa Bay Times-Miami Herald, found the Scotts have at least $5 million in a hedge fund that owns shares of Conduent, the company that operates SunPass, the state’s ill-starred highway toll collection system.

SunPass caused endless headaches for millions of motorists this year as transactions and late fees piled up during a three-month shutdown meant to last one week for system upgrades. The state waited more than a month to suspend payments to Conduent and another month to assess a fine. In May, a major Conduent stockholder hosted a fundraiser for Scott’s Senate campaign. In August, its Tallahassee lobbyist gave another, even as the toll snafu was pungent. Scott attended both.

The pattern of the Scotts’ investment “coincidences” began just before he took the oath of office, when he gave his wife his stake in a chain of urgent health care clinics he had founded. In office, he pushed a drug-testing program that would have benefitted the clinics. He’s also owned stock in a pharmaceutical company accused of inflating prices; Florida Medicaid paid $800 million, while other states looked for drugs costing less.

When he led utility providers to Puerto Rico last year to help restore electricity after a devastating hurricane, he also was protecting investments of at least $5 million by his trust and wife in another hedge fund that had issued a $9 billion line of credit to the island’s power authority.

Scott also owns as much as $500,000 in a corporate sibling of the company proposing a natural gas plant in Dania Beach, a project subject to his vote as a member of the Cabinet’s Power Plant Siting Board.

And the Scotts have as much as $750,000 in limited partnerships connected with a controversial natural gas pipeline proposal, which he and his appointees on the Public Service Commission approved.

Having cancelled the fully federal funded $2.4 billion bullet train project from Tampa to Orlando, a feature of Obama’s recession-ending stimulus, Scott became a big promoter of All Aboard Florida’s proposed passenger rail service extension to Orlando. The project depends on tax-exempt bonds, which are subject to state approval. The Scotts were financially connected to the project through a major stake, since sold very profitably, in a plastics company that made parts for the rail cars. They also invested in a credit fund corporately related to the rail company.