Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens (R), at right

One immediate bit of fallout from the Eric Greitens story came not in Missouri but in next-door Illinois, where GOP Gov. Bruce Rauner has for months been airing an obnoxious ad in which fellow Republican governors from neighboring states sarcastically "thank" Illinois House Speaker Mike Madigan (Rauner's top Democratic enemy) for creating new jobs in their states by raising taxes in his.

Rauner liked the spot so much that he spent $1.3 million to air it more than 3,100 times, but unfortunately for him, one of its stars is … Eric Greitens. As a result, Rauner has yanked the ad, but obviously, a lot of voters have now seen it—and with the two states sharing several overlapping media markets, those same folks are now hearing plenty about Greitens.

Rauner has a new ad, though, which he released just before the Greitens story exploded, and which he has to hope will allow him to step out of the pile of manure he unwittingly sank his foot into. The spot takes aim at the frontrunner for the Democratic nomination, billionaire investor J.B. Pritzker, even though the primary still isn't for another couple of months.

The minute-long ad consists entirely of a recording of a phone call between Pritzker and disgraced former Gov. Rod Blagojevich in November of 2008, taped as part of a wiretap by the FBI, which was investigating Blagojevich at the time. During the call, Blagojevich can be heard suggesting he could appoint Pritzker to the position of state attorney general, to which Pritzker responds, "Ooh, that's interesting."

Obviously, no such appointment was ever made (the attorney general's office never became vacant), and in any event, Pritzker made it clear in that same set of phone calls that he was interested in the job of state treasurer instead (which he also never got because that, too, didn't open up, and isn't mentioned in the ad). Blago soon thereafter was removed from office and sentenced to 14 years in prison, cementing him as the ultimate exemplar of political corruption in a state already notorious for it.

As we noted when audio of these calls became public last year, Pritzker never suggested anything untoward. Blagojevich at one point asked for a campaign donation, but Pritzker demurred (though he'd donated to Blago in the past). And had the FBI had any suspicions about Pritzker, they would have looked into them long ago. Ultimately, we could only conclude that this exchange represented "unappealing transactional politics rather than actual wrongdoing."

However, we also acknowledged that Rauner would "undoubtedly jump on this new opportunity to tie" Pritzker to Blago, and now he has. Obviously there's no way for Pritzker to directly push back against this ad, so he's doing the only thing that makes sense: going on the attack himself. Pritzker's put out two new spots of his own, the first of which hammers Rauner for concealing outbreaks of Legionnaire's Disease at a veterans home in the city of Quincy, which led to the deaths of 13 residents.

In the second, narrated by Pritzker himself, Pritzker snipes at Rauner for attacking him, then touts his own progressive priorities, including a plan to make Illinois "the first state in the nation to have a public option." That’s an interesting message, and we’ll be curious to see if Democrats elsewhere adopt it. But needless to say, with Rauner also being a billionaire, both men are going to spend a ton more to turn this into a very negative race.