For those of you who don’t follow Minnesota politics, you’ll have missed that our Republican Senate Majority Leader, one of the forces behind our upcoming vote on enshirining marriage discrimination in our constitution, stepped down a week ago.

There’s no hidden agenda behind her decision, Koch said. She decided to step down because it’s time to try other things.

Then we found out from others in the Republican leadership that this wasn’t true.

Republican leaders in the Minnesota Senate today said Amy Koch stepped down as Senate Majority Leader yesterday after they confronted her about allegations that she engaged in an inappropriate relationship with a male staffer.

The statement from Interim Senate Majority Leader Geoff Michel suggested they had just found out about the relationship. Then we found out from the person who reported it to them that this wasn’t true either.

Sheehan is also the first person to report an inappropriate relationship between Koch and a male staffer. He said he first learned of the relationship on Sept. 21.

In the meantime, we discovered that the person widely rumored to be the “male staffer” in question (he lost multiple positions with Republican leadership just after Koch’s resignation and with no other explanation offered) may not be such a sweetheart either.

Sarah reported that Michael had thrown a kid’s toy — though it wasn’t aimed at her — during the dispute, and stormed out of the house. Michael “slammed the door causing a frame to break.”

Sarah Brodkorb called 911 because “the level of anger in Michael’s voice scared both her and their three children,” according to the police report.

But it is only today that we discover who the true villains of the piece are.

An Open Apology to Amy Koch on Behalf of All Gay and Lesbian Minnesotans

Dear Ms. Koch,

On behalf of all gays and lesbians living in Minnesota, I would like to wholeheartedly apologize for our community’s successful efforts to threaten your traditional marriage.  We are ashamed of ourselves for causing you to have what the media refers to as an “illicit affair” with your staffer, and we also extend our deepest apologies to him and to his wife. These recent events have made it quite clear that our gay and lesbian tactics have gone too far, affecting even the most respectful of our society.

We apologize that our selfish requests to marry those we love has cheapened and degraded traditional marriage so much that we caused you to stray from your own holy union for something more cheap and tawdry.  And we are doubly remorseful in knowing that many will see this as a form of sexual harassment of a subordinate.

Gay community spokesperson John Medeiros (presumably the same Medeiros who is the curator of Intermedia Arts’s series of GLBT readings) has written a piece of high-grade snark that should not be missed. Read the whole thing.