By Yael T. Abouhalkah, Kansas City Star Editorial Page columnist

Birmingham Mayor Larry Langford is likely going to jail after his conviction Wednesday on federal charges of accepting bribes.

Now he's kicked out of office, too, for accepting cash and goods worth $236,000 when he was president of the Jefferson County Commission.

What a long, long way Langford has fallen after his visit to Kansas City last year at this time.

As I wrote back then, Langford and his wife, Melva, had visited the home of Mayor Mark Funkhouser and his wife, Gloria Squitiro, before the annual NAACP dinner.

Here's some of the rest of that report:

And as they say, the rest is history....

On Oct. 24, Squitiro posted a "personal note" on the Funk's Front Porch blog. She reported on the get-together with the 62-year-old Democrat from Alabama's largest city of 230,000:

"Mayor Langford is a dynamic personality and, much like my mayor, he calls it as he sees it and makes no apologies for doing so. Also like Funk, he is popular with his citizens for respecting them with the truth, and for finding solutions to their citywide problems. Funk and I were astounded with the progress that Mayor Langford has made in his first term.

"After visiting for only an hour we found out that Birmingham provides its mayor with a strong-Mayor form of government and, not only that, the mayor has a personal staff of 34, and, he is charge of the city’s 4,000 city employees. These variables would surely set the stage for moving things along at a more rapid clip than is traditionally seen in Kansas City."

Summed up, maybe the soap opera surrounding Funkhouser and Squitiro isn't such a bad thing. Sure, it's bad publicity for Kansas City. But at least our mayor hasn't been indicted."