OKLAHOMA CITY – Some folks will tell you pornography has never been as socially acceptable as it is right now, but I say those folks have never heard of ancient Rome.

Back then, long before famous men began sending dick pics to women with the patently insane notion women would appreciate receiving dick pics, Romans went around scrawling cock images everywhere they found a flat surface.

In such circumstances, it’s hard for me to imagine a Roman senator getting in hot water over, say, spending a handful of aureus on a pornographic mural or a nice big dick statue to put in his foyer.

Fast forward to 2017, when porn is alleged to be socially acceptable and a candidate for representative in Oklahoma’s 83^rd District finds himself in hot water over –- drumroll please –- a porn-related expense totaling a whopping ten bucks.

Sillier still, if you believe what prospective representative Jason Reese had to say about the matter, it’s $10 that wasn’t spent on porn at all. The offending line item was just a data-entry mistake made by a (now former) member of his campaign staff.

“I can assure you, I was as shocked as anyone,” Reese said about a line item on a recent campaign expense report suggesting his campaign had forked over $10.05 for an adult video. “Absolutely no illicit materials were bought with campaign funds.”

According to Reese, a staff member accidentally cut and pasted the title of a porn video he had open in a browser window while filling out the report. The real expense was a credit processing fee, but the staffer inadvertently entered the name of the (unidentified) porn movie instead.

Ever the hard-charging, fact-snooping news outlet, Oklahoma City’s KOCO News 5 noted, “Reese provided proof that no campaign money was used for porn.”

Holy shit, right? We’d better bring in some badass military interrogators and waterboard this perverted son of a bitch until he spills the XXX beans, pronto.

Shit, when he was called on to provide proof of his claims, even Barrack Obama had the decency to fake a long-form birth certificate. This lazy bastard can’t come up with anything better than a vague assertion of a careless mistake made by some horny, inattentive slacker on his staff?

Don’t worry, though. Whether Reese is telling the truth or just engaged in some political sleight of hand, this porn expense thing is going to keep him occupied in the days ahead, regardless his guilt or innocence and despite any embarrassment the incident already has caused him.

“There is going to be a little laughter for a while,” Reese said. “I can handle that.”

More important than Reese’s intestinal fortitude, though, is his commitment to avoiding similar mistakes in the future. Accurate expense reporting is an effort Reese will now take into his own hands, like the unidentified staff member presumably did with his penis when he should have been paying attention to his clipboard.

Yes, that’s right: According to KOCO News, Reese said “he plans on personally checking all future campaign reports before they are submitted.”

Call me a cynic, but this vow only makes me more suspicious about Reese’s perversion. I mean, of course he’s going to he’s going to check every report now. Sounds like those things occasionally provide better must-see porn tips than Rabbit’s Reviews!

Image: detail from a mural depicting Priapus with the attributes of Mercury, found in Pompeii. Public domain, via Museo Archeologico Nazionale in Naples, Italy.