It's official: The people in Louisiana’s 2nd Congressional district are masochists.

That has to be the reason why they voted to send Rep. William J. Jefferson, a man with legal woes the size of the federal deficit, back to Washington recently. I’d prefer to believe that there’s a psychological reason behind their choice rather than another one: That they’re just straight-up stupid.

This past Saturday, Jefferson, Louisiana’s first black congressman since Reconstruction, overwhelmingly defeated state Rep. Karen Carter, who is also black, in a runoff to keep his House seat. This would be the Jefferson who is being investigated for bribery; the man whose Washington home was raided by FBI agents who found about $90,000 in marked bills in his freezer.

The FBI said it had videotaped him earlier taking $100,000 in marked bills from an informant. On top of that, two of his associates -- the owner of a company seeking lucrative contracts in Africa and a former congressional aide -- have also pleaded guilty to bribing him.

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True, Jefferson hasn’t been charged with a crime yet. But the evidence so far is damning. And right now the people in his New Orleans district, a place where Hurricane Katrina ripped a particularly devastating swath, don’t have the luxury of giving a tainted congressman the benefit of the doubt. This is, after all, a time when they need someone who can persuade those who are holding the purse strings that the money they need to continue to recover from devastation won’t wind up packed next to a side of beef.

If Jefferson is indicted and pleads guilty or he’s convicted, he’ll have to quit or face being expelled. If he’s indicted and goes to trial, well then, he’s going to be distracted from his congressional duties to deal with his legal woes.

But even if Jefferson manages to escape being indicted, his presence will still carry a cloud. He has already been removed from the powerful House Ways and Means Committee, and he could find himself further marginalized in a Democratic congress that came to power on a platform of cleaning up corruption.

In any case, I can’t see how Jefferson is going to be of much use to those who voted for him. And it amazes me that Jefferson -- a man who used National Guard troops to help him retrieve his belongings from his house after Katrina when they should have been used to rescue constituents who were stranded and roasting on rooftops -- managed to command such loyalty. But that loyalty will quickly be reduced to a liability for a district that is poorer and needier since Katrina.

Yet, I can see how he managed to grab another term.

Many times, black people, having been beleaguered with a history of our elected officials being singled out and targeted by the feds, tend to automatically see investigation as persecution. Our sympathies and our loyalties tend to lay with the person rather than the institution he or she represents. And since there are still relatively few of us in high positions, many of us feel the need to protect, rather than scrutinize, those folks.

I understand it. But it’s time for that kind of political masochism to stop.

Why? Because when black elected officials mess up, the people they hurt the most tend to be other black people. And the black people who continue to vote for them need to understand that they don’t need to prove their trustworthiness to a black elected official if that official violates his or her trust to them.

Again, I know that Jefferson is still innocent until proven guilty. But he still has offered no plausible explanation as to how $90,000 in marked bills wound up in his freezer. Other than denying any wrongdoing, all he has said is that there are two sides to the story.

To which people like my boyfriend retort: “I wanna hear yours.”

Until such questions are answered, Katrina victims will be stuck with a representative who no one trusts, whose skittish colleagues are going to assume that any phone call they take from him is likely being tapped.

And that’s going to hurt.