Texas elected itself a brand spankin’ new Attorney General – who needs a spankin’.

First off, he’s probably facing felony criminal charges and is likely to be indicted while he’s a sitting attorney general.  He has already been fined by the Texas State Securities Board for hanky-panky.

And now, come to find out, he’s got sticky fingers.

A Dallas lawyer name Joe Joplin went through a metal detector at the Collin county courthouse.  He was in a hurry.

A few hours later, he realized he’d left a tray of three pens at the metal detector. One was a gift from his wife — a $1,000 Montblanc.

He says he’s not really into fancy pens but it was a special gift from his wife so he went to hunt it down.

“It came back like a Kodak moment. I knew I’d put it in a separate bin and that second plate didn’t come out,” Joplin recalled in a recent interview.

He rushed to the security entrance and the pen was gone. Joplin talked to the sheriff’s deputies, who told him that shortly after Joplin went through, another man picked up a tray of pens on top of the machine.

The deputies didn’t recall the other man.  Joplin asked to see the video of the security camera but the deputies said they couldn’t help.

Joplin, frustrated and a bit frightened of telling his wife, wrote to an old friend, “just to vent.” The boyhood pal was Collin County Sheriff Terry Box.

In an Aug. 14, 2013, email, Joplin recounted the details. “The loss of my pen is my responsibility,” he wrote, but he also thought a lost and found procedure might be instituted.

Sheriff Box did better than that.  He ordered up the video tape.

That’s when the sheriff recognized State Senator and soon-to-be Texas attorney general Ken Paxton take one of the three pens out of the basket and put it in his pocket.

“It looked like he took a pen and put it in his pocket out of the tray,” Box said.

He asked a deputy to call Paxton and see whether he had it. He looked. He did. A day or so later, Paxton gave the pricey rollerball pen to a deputy to return to Joplin, the sheriff said.

So Paxton walked around for a year with a $1,000 pen in his pocket and never noticed?  Really?  Did he think the Montblanc Fairy left it under his pillow?  I don’t know about you but I don’t keep up with pens very long – unless, of course, it was a $1,000 pen.

Paxton’s spokesman says it was “a simple mistake.”  Yeah.

I’m gonna suggest that when he takes office, we put a chain on all the office supplies.  No telling how much this guy could cost us in staplers and laptops that he mistakenly takes home.

Thanks to Tim for the heads up.