9/11, eh? Could you pretty it up for me?

So Mike DeWine is the junior Senator from Ohio, and he's locked in what should be a fairly tight battle with Sherrod Brown, longtime Congressman and true-blue progressive populist. The Ohio Republican Party, rocked with scandal after scandal, in particular the one involving GOP fundraiser Tom Noe swiping cash from the state worker's compensation fund to buy rare coins, two of which he promptly lost.

It'll be a long, tough campaign. So to a Republican, I guess that means it's time to bring out the 9/11 imagery. Which DeWine promptly did, in his first ad of the season, which featured a shot of the Twin Towers burning.

Which honestly is bad enough. I didn't know 3,000 people died so that the Republican Party could have a good backdrop. And they're the ones screaming about Democrats showing flag-draped coffins in ads, which is the result of a particular policy, but they have no problem showing innocent Americans dying in Manhattan, which was not based on any policy, certainly none taken by their political opponents.

But here's where the story gets insane.

DeWine didn't use footage from 9/11. He doctored a shot of the Twin Towers:

"This particular image is impossible," says W. Gene Corley, a stuctural engineer who led the Federal Emergency Management Agency's building performance study of the World Trade Center after the attacks. Corley reviewed the ad at www.brownvotes.com for U.S. News. "The north tower was hit first, [so] the south tower could not be burning without the north tower burning." Corley says. "The smoke is all wrong." The day of the attacks, the plumes of ash were drifting to the southeast. "The smoke on 9/11 was never in a halo like that," he added.

DeWine's office acknowledged the error. "The senator was unaware that the image of the towers was a graphic representation and has instructed the campaign to replace the footage with a picture of the twin towers," his office said in a statement on Wednesday evening.

DeWine spokesman Brian Seitchik says the image of the burning towers in the ad was a still photo with computer-generated smoke added.

Now, there are only a couple reasons for this. One is that they couldn't locate a shot of the WTC before the ad had to air. Which means DeWine has the most pathetic creative team on Earth. Who can't find a 9/11 shot?

The other option is that someone is sick enough to look at burning buildings after planes have flown into them and think, "Boy, that needs to be art directed."

I'm going to go with incompetent. Because the other choice just makes me shudder.

Support Sherrod Brown in Ohio.

UPDATE: TPM Muckraker notes that the group who made the ad also did the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth ones. Maybe I should rethink my choice that they were incomptent and go right to sick bastards...