By Barb Shelly, Kansas City Star editorial page columnist

Former Kansas Attorney General Phill Kline uses the ACORN scandal to rehash his old claims that unreported child rape was rampant in Kansas, and his efforts to stop it were thwarted by a united front involving George Tiller, Planned Parenthood, Kathleen Sebelius and the liberal media.

Kline revisits familiar territory in an essay titled "Indifference and callousness in the name of tolerance in the post-modern relativist world," published on a website, RenewAmerica.com.

Unreported child rape was the hook Kline used to persuade a judge and later the Kansas Supreme Court to grant him access to medical records of some patients at Kansas abortion clinics. None of his claims was found to be valid -- a circumstance Kline continues to attribute to the grand conspiracy.

Before Tiller, the abortion doctor, was murdered this summer, his lawyers made a strong case that Kline and his deputies knowingly presented faulty evidence to a judge in order to gain access to the records.

Kline didn't mention in his essay that he and two deputies are under investigation by the Kansas attorney discipline office for possibly violating the Kansas Rules of Professional Conduct. The office has not revealed the nature of the alleged violations.

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