By Stewart Tongue

YNOT – Nothing screams “I’m a politician!” these days quite like hanging your penis out the window of a car moving 90 MPH while you masturbate.

William Blakely, 30, formerly the vice-mayor of Mount Carmel, Tenn., attempted to prove that point immediately prior to his arrest on charges of indecency, reckless endangerment and criminal attempt to commit aggravated assault. He will face a judge June 14.

According to preliminary testimony rendered by two separate female witnesses, Blakely was driving his car at breakneck speed when he “wav[ed], grabbed his shirt, kind of pulled it up” and “was was taking his hand, wetting his mouth, and masturbating.”

Other witnesses provided similar accounts.

“At over 90 miles per hour, he had his penis out [the window] [sic]…,” Kelly Street testified. “[H]e was masturbating … and that’s when it got really, really bad. I wouldn’t look over any more, and I wrote his tag number down on my hand, which I believe he noticed, and he exited very quickly.”

The incident was far from Blakely’s first brush with daredevil antics that would put the cast of The Fast and the Furious to shame. In 2010, he was the subject of a similar complaint in Church Hill, Tenn., but the complainant declined to move forward with prosecution in order to avoid embarrassment, according to the town’s police chief. The Mount Carmel police chief confirmed at least two investigations of similar incidents “around 2010” while Blakely was in office, according to Tennessee news website TimesNews.net.

Blakely may take solace in the notion he is hardly alone. Sexual misconduct is becoming de rigueur among elected officials at all levels of government, and often the accused manages to shake off the negative publicity and get back in the game. Former U.S. Rep. Anthony Weiner, who is married, is considering a run for mayor in the wake of a scandal that involved sending images of his penis to women via Twitter. Former South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford is neck-and-neck in a bitter congressional race with the sister of Comedy Central satirist Stephen Colbert after Sanford notoriously “disappeared,” only to emerge and claim he’d been hiking the Appalachian Trail. Sanford, who was married at the time, later admitted he had taken an impromptu vacation to South America with his Argentine mistress.