Anderson County Council member Cindy Wilson has always been a master of political theater, and her refusal to flush a toilet to celebrate the completion of the $15 million Beaverdam Creek sewer line was sheer poetry.

Had the County Community Relations Department not come up with this ridiculous, only-in-Anderson! “made-for-YouTube” event, I would have suspected Ms. Wilson’s political genius at work.

This dainty act of defiance, no doubt introduced in her most honeyed, “Gone With The Wind” voice, captured Ms. Wilson at her most regal, as if her good manners alone prevented her from engaging in an action so … down to earth.

The scene also balled up a decade’s worth of tragicomic absurdity about how such a Southern lady could have led a brass-knuckle crusade against a local government — all starting with her anger over the county’s decision to install infrastructure near her family farm in northeast Anderson County.

For what it’s worth, I always had sympathy for her desire to see northeast Anderson County remain the rural idyll that it was once was, even if it was fanciful.

I also admired her tenacity in refusing to be intimidated — or just exhausted — into silence, even as personal animosity seemed to overtake her efforts.

Her two consecutive landslide victories at the ballot box short-circuited possibly the most valid “objective” criticism that could be leveled at her: That her obsessive focus on her personal agenda left her constituents out in the cold.

Some people might share my bleak amusement at Thursday’s spectacle. But it’s not a cheap laugh.

The truth is that Ms. Wilson has changed the face of Anderson County politics forever.

The specters of bribery, corruption, dodgy accounting and seedy morals that she raised up in efforts to discredit the county administration will never die, no matter that there’s never been any proof of anything untoward.

The coalition she put together of Citizens Against Virtually Everything — some of whose more colorful characters decided stalking, harassing, and entrapping public officials was morally defensible in support of the cause — will remain to be bedevil our politics for decades to come.

Meanwhile competing counties will be laughing all the way to the bank as they point to our unstable, fractious, slimy, wacky politics to recruit businesses at our expense.

At the flushing ceremony, the county officials’ crowing about the sewer line’s benefits to development certainly sounded like a hollow victory to me.

I hope Ms. Wilson is ready finally, gracefully, to concede she’s lost this epic 10-year sewer battle.

But despite the courtesy flushes from her fellow council members, I think the bad smell from this saga will linger for decades.