Two weeks can seem like an eternity, but not for Somerville politics. We wrote on September 26th that it seemed as though the snooze fest election cycle would resume across the city, especially with one particular candidate for public office not having made the final election.

Such is not the case in Ward 5 – where there have been rumors swirling about an owner of an establishment in Magoun Square making a veiled threat against a store owner in the same square in order to get that person to remove a political sign from his window. You would think some people would be smarter than that, especially ones who depend on the local crowd to frequent their establishments in order to make money to keep their doors open. Not smart.

Its one thing to smash someone’s yard sign – that’s nothing new – and fairly insignificant in the grand scheme of things, but telling a foreign-born person who is struggling to make a living that they can’t keep someone’s sign in their window when there are political banners larger than people’s cars on buildings less than 300 yards from that store is sick. It doesn’t matter who you are or who you know – that’s not right, period.

Any candidate for office that has any knowledge of such behavior should be ashamed of themselves and held as equally accountable in the eyes of the law as the person committing the crime, whatever that may be. If the average person on the street has heard the same rumor and can give the tiniest little detail about what happened, does anyone for a second honestly believe that the candidate doesn’t know about it either before, during or afterward? Don’t be naïve.

What makes it more frustrating is that we, as journalists trying to report on this as a news story, can try to talk to the store owner or to the candidates or even the people who supposedly did the threatening – but the reality is that nobody will talk to us, and as a result, nothing more than a quick commentary or a letter to the editor gets printed.

And who does that serve?