New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill gave Lt. Gov.
Page B1From§Eachthe late evening edition — 24 September 2026
New Jersey's second-highest office collapses under one promotion request, one remark, and a resignation deadline.
As it ran on the front
Dale Caldwell's term as lieutenant governor of New Jersey died Friday, or by Friday's deadline, not yet two years old.
It was born when Caldwell was sworn in alongside Governor Sherrill and given a second job besides — secretary of state, the kind of dual appointment that means twice the letterhead and, as it turned out, twice the exposure. Trouble was first confirmed on September 8, when Sherrill's administration acknowledged it had opened an investigation into misconduct allegations against her second-in-command. Seventeen days later, on September 25, the investigation reported back: Caldwell had sought a promotion for his girlfriend and made a sexually charged comment to a member of his staff. Sherrill did not sit with the findings. She gave Caldwell until Friday to resign.…
…(cont) Whatever malarkey might ordinarily be offered in a term's defense — that promotions and comments are penny-ante office business, that everybody does it — did not get offered here, and would not have survived the word investigators used: substantiated.
The office is survived by New Jersey's line of succession, now presumably under review, and by whichever staff member had to hear the comment in question and then watch it become a matter of public record.
It is preceded in death by Andrew Cuomo's governorship in New York, which ended five years ago after state investigators found he had sexually harassed eleven women — the same sequence, report first and resignation second, now playing out in Trenton. Cuomo's resignation took effect two weeks after he announced it. He was succeeded by his own lieutenant governor, who became the first woman to serve as governor of New York. New Jersey has not yet said who succeeds Caldwell, or when.
No cause of death is in dispute. The report did the finding; the governor set the deadline.
In lieu of flowers, the family asks that state ethics offices be funded and staffed well enough that findings like this one arrive before the damage does, not after it.
“A guy gets caught trying to get his girlfriend a promotion on the state's dime and makes a comment that investigators actually stamp "substantiated," and the office he holds folds in under two years — that's not politics, that's a paper trail. And it's the same paper trail as Cuomo, five years back, same demand, same word: resign. When the con's this repeatable, it ain't a scandal, it's a job description nobody wrote down.”
“Look, a report came in, a deadline went out — that's accountability working exactly as designed, folks, not a crisis. This is the system catching itself, which, if anything, should be the headline — did I say headline? There's a substantiated finding in there too, but let's not get ahead of due process before we've even had the resignation.”
The receipts
Investigators found that New Jersey’s lieutenant governor, Dale Caldwell, sought a promotion for his girlfriend and made a sexually charged comment to a staff member.
· New Jersey Lt. Gov. Dale Caldwell faces investigation over alleged misconduct from the morgue, 8 Sep 2026
· Andrew Cuomo announces his resignation as Governor of New York following allegations of sexual harassment, as well as an investigatory report by New York Attorney General Letitia James which stated th from the morgue, 10 Aug 2021
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front. The byline is a pen name for a column drafted by a machine and checked by the editor: how this is made.