By Editorial Staff , Chicago Sun-Times

September 25, 2007

Jerry Weller's announcement last week that he won't run for re-election as the Republican congressman from the 11th District was at least one term late and a host of disclosures short. But otherwise, it couldn't have been timelier: A few days earlier, he was named one of the most corrupt members of Congress by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics.

Midway through his seventh term, Weller has given that watchdog group plenty to chew on. He is dogged by charges he improperly disclosed land purchases in Nicaragua. He also is one of a dozen members of Congress resisting a subpoena to testify in a bribery trial involving jailed former Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham.

And then there's his interest-conflicting marriage to Guatemalan legislator Zury Rios de Weller. When they wed, he was vice chairman of the Western Hemisphere subcommittee of the International Relations Committee, which oversees issues like drug trafficking in Latin America. Her political party was accused of enabling the drug trade. Small wonder he never said anything about it. Now, after the discovery that she formed an Illinois nonprofit organization with close associates of his, he refuses to disclose her finances.

Weller also doesn't like answering questions about his ethics problem. When TV newsman Mike Flannery pursued him after his retirement speech in Joliet, he got shoved twice by a Weller aide near a stairway, knocking him into a woman. Maybe that's the way they did things in Guatemala when Mrs. Weller's old man was in power. It's not the way we do things even in as tough a political state as this one.