Nevada’s governor has received an uptick in popularity, possibly because he is doing the best he can with what he’s been given, and it wasn’t sex, apparently.

Compared to Tiger Woods and John Edwards, Gov. Jim Gibbons looks like a prude. Yet left-leaning pundits and n’er-do-wells want us to believe otherwise.

In a recent article, Politics Daily described Gov. Jim Gibbons as a “scandal-scarred” candidate, doubtful to win the GOP gubernatorial nomination this June, citing a “nasty divorce, stories about extramarital affairs and charges that he assaulted a cocktail waitress.”

Just throw Gibbons under the bus with rotten husbands like Woods, Edwards, and Sanford, right? Wrong. Relative to them, about whom there is proof galore, the governor’s rumored scandals appear rather lame, like his jokes.

The waitress’s criminal assault claim, brought nearly four years ago during Gibbons’s election campaign, was dropped after investigation, due to lack of evidence. The Gibbons divorce had a few newsworthy moments, but it became anti-climactic and was settled. No sordid details, just “He got the guns, she got the art.”

Now the waitress is back, wanting to file a cover-up lawsuit against the governor, not surprisingly  during his re-election campaign. Her reappearance has re-fueled the old hound-dog allegations of infidelity. In a deposition given to the waitress’s attorney, Gibbons testified this month that he had not been intimate with his wife or any other woman since 1995, saying, “I’m living proof that you can survive without sex for that long.”

That’s not a claim most men would proudly make, ever. Perhaps the governor doesn’t have a sordid sex life for waitresses and the left to exploit after all. Given how easy it is to prove, post Tiger, we’d have lots of proof by now, wouldn’t we?

Without sex or a scandal, Nevada’s incumbent Republican governor has moved up in the polls. Gibbons is now just 7 points behind the leading GOP candidate, Brian Sandoval, the former Nevada attorney general and federal judge, who was beating him by 16 points last month.

According to the newest Mason-Dixon poll conducted for the Las Vegas Review-Journal, 24 percent of those polled are still undecided. With a 6-point margin of error, it seems clear there is still a great deal of ambiguity about who Nevada Republicans will elect June 8.

What is also clear is that political pundits on the the uber-left have a bone to pick with Gibbons and his supporters. University of Nevada political scientist Erik Herzik told the Review-Journal that Gibbons’s uptick in the polls was from conservative Republicans who only care about the governor’s “no new taxes” pledge. Herzik said that Gibbons “could be an ax murderer,” and conservatives would still vote for him, as long as he doesn’t raise taxes.

No, Mr. Herzik, we wouldn’t. As with most people, we conservatives don’t like murderers, liars, cheats… or professional finger pointers and whiners. True, Gibbons’s sexless marriage didn’t last, and now that we know, we’re not surprised. Gibbons’s pledge to taxpayers has remained steadfast, however, despite every attempt to undermine it by the legislature and liberal educrats like UNR’s Herzik, who fits the motto: “Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach.”

No one who has watched Governor Gibbons battle with the Democratic-controlled state legislature over the budget envies Gibbons. Those of us who have run companies and worked in Nevada’s private sector understand the near-impossible task at hand, and we wouldn’t want Governor Gibbons’s job.

Gibbons is sticking to his guns and fighting to make our state government live within its means, and we like it. Conservatives prefer gun-toting governors, not axe-murderers, Mr. Herzik.