A system by which state legislators got flat monthly expense payments without actually incurring expenses-that’s been changed.

Mark Darr is no longer lieutenant governor, having been brought down.

Circuit Judge Mike Maggio of Conway is inactive by order of the Supreme Court after it came out that he had made improper postings on a sports-fan website and received curiously timed political contributions.

And now, just in the last few days, Secretary of State Mark Martin’s press spokesman, Alex Reed, has had to leave a position on the Pulaski County Election Commission. He may face problems substantially greater than that owing to financial irregularities in the campaign accounts of Republican congressional hopeful Ann Clemmer, for whom he formerly was treasurer.

Put all of those down as notches in the belt of the Blue Hog, a new and real force in Arkansas politics and government.

The Blue Hog is 35-year-old lawyer Matt Campbell of Little Rock. When not building his fledgling law firm, the Pinnacle Law Firm, he writes the Blue Hog Report-at bluehogreport.com. There he periodically discloses his discoveries from investigations undertaken in his spare time and for no remuneration, usually into Republican misbehavior.

He’s liberal (a compliment, not an attack) and from outside Springfield,Mo. He went to Avila University in Kansas City and to law school at Washington University in St. Louis.

He came to Little Rock seven years ago, first as an investigator for the Pulaski County public defender’s office, and then as a criminal case coordinator for the Arkansas Supreme Court.

What he liked most in law school was researching records.

What he most likes most about researching records is encountering those that he can’t understand, then obsessing on figuring them out. He likes following money trails.

So while in the employment of the Supreme Court in 2010, he started the Blue Hog blog and, before long, exposed the legislative expense scam.

Then he started pestering Secretary of State Mark Martin with an array of Freedom of Information requests. That, in turn, led the state Republican Party to make a similar array of FOI requests of the Supreme Court to determine if Campbell was blogging on state time.

He wasn’t, or so he insisted. He was writing his blog in the evenings and using the time-release function in the software to have the items post at designated times during the day.

Members of the Supreme Court told him they weren’t going to tell him to quit blogging, but that they kind of wished he would. That was their way of telling him to quit without telling him to quit. Supreme Court justices wouldn’t want to restrict free expression.

So Campbell shut down the blog. Then, last May, freshly out on his own to start the law firm, he reactivated it.

He says he and his wife, Leabeth, pondered the pros and cons of restarting a political blog while starting a law firm and raising two young kids. He says the decision to fire up the blog has enhanced his profile-which was largely the point-and brought in business rather than taken it away.

In his one year back as a blogger, the Blue Hog nailed Darr for campaign-account abuse and Maggio for judicial indiscretion and Reed for violating the law by working for Clemmer’s campaign while, in addition to being the secretary of state’s spokesman, serving on the county election commission.

All Republicans, you notice.

A Democratic sympathizer, Campbell says the Republican emphasis is not necessarily by design.

The earlier legislative expensive scandal touched Democrats as well. And Campbell says that, in the course of looking into Darr’s behavior with campaign and public expense money, he made a parallel examination of those kinds of records for the Democratic auditor of state, Charlie Daniels. He didn’t find anything.

So let’s hear it for Charlie.

My ultimate question for Campbell was whether he saw his accomplishments with the blog as an indictment of the quality of traditional media, primarily the newspaper.

He said no. He said it revealed instead the limitations of the newspaper in the modern business climate in being able to invest in enough staff to free reporters for longer-term investigative work.

What Campbell does for free and a vocationally from time to time-because he enjoys it-would be time that the traditional media, trying to make a buck, would have to pay for, probably on overtime.

Even so, the one-two punch-first by Campbell, then by the newspaper-has been working pretty well.

Each of Campbell’s scoops has been followed and advanced by reporting in this newspaper-reporting that usually credits Campbell with the initial expose.

Anyway, what really matters is that public officeholders are surely behaving better these days knowing that a certain research-obsessed young lawyer might direct his part-time obsession to them next-and prompt the newspaper to get on their case as well.

Surely.

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John Brummett’s column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at [email protected]. Read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com, or his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.

Editorial, Pages 15 on 05/01/2014