A thorough moral and political indictment of Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County, Ariz., would spill far beyond this page. It would catalog the years of racial profiling, the tormenting of immigrants and Latinos, the physical mistreatment and humiliation of inmates and defendants, the beatings and neglect and deaths behind bars, the abuses of office — withholding records, harassing and persecuting elected officials and journalists, failing to investigate hundreds of unsolved sex crimes, squandering taxpayer funds on crime sweeps and “posses” and looney-tune vendettas, like the mission to expose President Obama’s supposedly forged birth certificate.

The actual criminal indictment that he faces is a lot simpler. On Monday, federal officials charged him with contempt of court. If the sheriff is found guilty at a misdemeanor level, he could go to prison for six months.

The federal judge in a long-running racial-profiling lawsuit had told Sheriff Arpaio and his chief deputy in 2011 to stop abusing Latinos by pulling them over on suspicion of being in the country illegally, in the absence of any other charges. That is, for the sheriff to stop acting as a federal immigration agency unto himself.

This the sheriff did not do, according to the indictment.

Sheriff Arpaio, who is running for a seventh term, says he is innocent. He insists he won’t give up, won’t take a plea deal, won’t resign. In an unsurprising play at victimhood, he accused the feds of “a blatant abuse of power,” of applying a different standard of justice to a lonely lawman who, in his words, “dares enforce the rule of law.”