By Barb Shelly, Kansas City Star Editorial Page columnist

Maybe you’ve seen it. The campaign ad cites the authoritative journal Education Week to claim that Democrat Barack Obama has been missing in action on education reform.

It concludes with a zinger: “Obama’s one accomplishment? Legislation to teach ‘comprehensive sex education’ to kindergartners. Learning about sex before learning to read? Barack Obama.”

Shamelessly misleading the public? Republican Sen. John McCain.

As the invaluable voter information service, FactCheck.org, points out, just about everything in the ad is wrong.

“The claim is simply false,” a FactCheck writer says of the allegation that Obama pushed a proposal to teach sex education to kindergartners.

While serving in the Illinois state senator, Obama supported, but did not sponsor, a bill to update the state’s sex education curriculum. It included lessons that would have instructed very young students about skills to “maintain healthy relationships and avoid unwanted sexual activity.” The bill never passed.

Obama did cosponsor what became the Chicago Education Reform Act of 2003. Among other things, it expanded the number of charter schools in the city.

The FactCheck writer found that the quotes from publications used in McCain’s ad had all been taken out of context.

These are old tricks we’ve been seeing in local elections for years.

Distort. Twist. Deceive. Damage. And the winning candidate drags a load of public contempt into office.

I had hoped for better from McCain.

He told us, in his moving speech at the Republican National Convention, that he loves his country. But surely he knows his country suffers from a bitter partisan wound. You don’t show love by shoving the knife deeper into the cut.

Campaigns get nasty, and accountability diminishes with each election cycle. Vicious e-mails or posts by anonymous bloggers can circulate around the world in a matter of hours. Certainly Obama’s supporters have thrown their share of slime.

Candidates can’t stop every dirty trick. But they shouldn’t engage in them, as McCain did with the sex education ad.

And they shouldn’t expect to soar above the fray while authorizing underlings to get down and dirty.

At the Republican convention, vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin and former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani heaped scorn on Obama’s background as a community organizer.

Palin mocked the Democrat for standing up for the rights of prisoners — something McCain himself has done.

The mud was thick on the convention center floor by the time McCain appeared for his lofty speech about building a better America.

McCain has been a principled public servant. He opposed George Bush’s administration on torture. He joined the bipartisan “Gang of 14” to head off a Senate blowup over judicial appointments. At great political risk, he stood up for a common-sense immigration policy.

But his campaign is using the slimy tactics that George Bush and his strategist Karl Rove used against McCain in the 2000 Republican primary. Some of the people on McCain’s reinvigorated campaign team are disciples of Rove himself.

And what about Obama, you ask? Well, I’m not one who thinks the “lipstick on a pig” remark was a sexist smear. But Obama has stretched the truth in some ads and speeches, and misstated some things, according to FactCheck.org.

The Obama campaign has not yet stooped to the tactic of repeating a deception so often it begins to look like reality.

FactCheck, which is operated by the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania, has written that McCain’s attacks on Obama’s tax policy amount to a “pattern of deceit.”

John McCain may win the presidency this way, but he will lose the respect he has acquired over the years.

Barbara Shelly is a member of the editorial board. She can be reached at 816-234-4594 or at . She blogs at voices.kansascity.com