As you might know by now, the U.S. attorney's office in Chicago has agreed to drop all felony charges against Illinois state Representative LaShawn Ford (D-Chicago) and has charged him instead with a simple misdemeanor.

The original 17 federal counts of bank fraud and submitting false information to a bank each carried a potential sentence of 30 years in prison and a $1-million fine - meaning that Ford was essentially looking at spending the rest of his natural life behind bars for allegedly obtaining a credit line greater than his eligibility and using part of the proceeds for things unrelated to the loan's stated purpose.

The new charge of delivering a false tax return to the IRS is calculated in the plea agreement to be a term of zero to six months.

What the heck happened here?

Back in January, state Senator Michael Frerichs formally kicked off his campaign for Illinois state treasurer and posted a video online touting the fact the he'd ended "free, lifetime health care for state legislators."

Actually, Frerichs had voted against that bill in the General Assembly. Frerichs' campaign had to pull the video and replace it with a new one, even though he'd been planning his formal launch for at least a year.

In April, Frerichs appeared to flip-flop on his longstanding position that the comptroller's and treasurer's offices should be merged.

Frerichs told a WBBM Radio interviewer: "People have said to me, 'Wouldn't it just be a lot more efficient if we just had one financial officer?' And I've said yes, we could become very efficient, efficient like the city of Dixon, Illinois, who just had one chief financial officer and she was able, from this small little town, over several years to take something like $52 million away from them." He was referring to Rita Crundwell, who in 2012 pleaded guilty to embezzling the money. Frerichs was quickly forced to restate his support for the office merger.

A new Capitol Fax/We Ask America poll found Republican Bruce Rauner leading Democratic Governor Pat Quinn 51 to 39 percent. That's pretty much the same margin the pollster found for another client a month ago.

The poll of 940 likely voters was taken July 8 and has a margin of error of 3.2 percent. Thirty percent of the calls were made to mobile phones.

Quinn has repeatedly blasted Rauner for using complicated loopholes to avoid some taxes. I wanted to test the issue.

"Republican Bruce Rauner's tax returns for 2010 and 2011 show that despite making around $55 million, he was not required to pay Social Security or Medicare taxes," respondents were told.

Sixty percent said that made them less likely to vote for Rauner, 20 percent said it made no difference, and another 20 percent said it made them more likely to vote for the candidate.

It occurred to me when I was recently in Chicago that the media furor about Donald Trump's insistence that he be allowed to hang 20-foot-high letters spelling out his name on his new skyscraper is pretty much the mindset behind Governor Pat Quinn's campaign to tag "Billionaire Bruce Rauner" as a rich, out-of-touch, right-wing white guy.

So I commissioned a poll. While a majority actually agree that Trump had the right to hang his letters, he's not popular here and voters don't think that people like him can understand regular folks.