Revelations of extensive plagiarism in work that gubernatorial candidate Scott McInnis claimed as his own call into question his fitness for public office.

The lifted work, examined in The Denver Post, constitutes inexcusable intellectual thievery. It is so damaging that we believe McInnis ought to drop out of the race.

Colorado’s next governor should be a person of integrity, a trusted hand to lead the state through difficult times.

The Post revealed in Tuesday’s paper that McInnis was paid to write essays on water in 2005 and 2006 yet turned in writings that had been plagiarized. Now we learn he did the same thing in a 1994 op-ed in the Rocky Mountain News.

We were astonished Tuesday to hear McInnis, in an interview with 9News, call the revelations over his water essays a “non-issue.” Later, he did tell us he had made a mistake and that he should have checked the material. Yes, he should have.

The Hasan Family Foundation paid McInnis $300,000 over two years to give talks on water issues and write original, monthly articles on the topic. The plagiarism detailed by Post reporter Karen E. Crummy is extensive.

McInnis says he hired a consultant to serve as an expert for the writings. Yet the foundation hired McInnis as the expert, and McInnis’ work never mentioned the help of anyone else. It was presented as his own.

The written work he submitted to the foundation included numerous instances of passages that were copied, with few changes, from scholarly work originated by Gregory J. Hobbs, who is now a Colorado Supreme Court justice.

The former congressman was paid handsomely for work that he said was “original and not reprinted from any other source.” It was McInnis’ obligation to ensure that was true.

Unfortunately, this is not the first time we’ve had questions about McInnis’ judgment.

During his final term in Congress, he paid his wife $37,000 to be his campaign manager — even though he already had decided he wasn’t going to run for re-election.

As we said in 2004, the arrangement “smacks of bad judgment.”

More recently, we were taken aback by McInnis’ refusal to release tax forms, even though Colorado’s gubernatorial candidates since 1998 routinely have done so.

What is he hiding?

McInnis’ financial records are pertinent information. Detractors have characterized him as a “lawyer-lobbyist,” and we think voters have a right to know how he has made his money.

We’ve also been puzzled by McInnis’ inability — or refusal, it’s difficult to know which — to provide detail on his philanthropy even though he claims to have been generous to individuals down on their luck.

The best specific example he could come up with was having given the meat of a dead elk to a family in need. Equally odd was his failure to recall being a member of an advisory board for a pro-choice GOP group.

The plagiarism and other issues have cumulatively so damaged McInnis’ credibility that we do not believe he can be an effective governor. Even though McInnis acknowledged he made a mistake, he still spent part of Tuesday blaming a research assistant for the failure to credit the work.

If you put your name on something and take money for it — a lot of money in this case — it is your responsibility to make rock-solid sure it is bona fide, original work that will stand up to scrutiny.

The state’s chief executive must be someone Coloradans can believe in as the state suffers a stretch of tight budgets and a struggling economy.

If Scott McInnis cannot be trusted to turn in what amounts to an overpaid term paper — without plagiarizing someone else’s work — there is no way he can be relied upon to guide Colorado through these complicated times.