News-Record.com

Remember that game "telephone" you played as a kid. Everyone sits in a circle, the first person things up some silly sentence, and it gets whispered one person to the next until it gets to the last person. Invariably, a simple statement such as, "I like cheddar cheese" gets translated into "I think Ned is a sleaze."

Well, Congressman Howard Coble played his very own version with Mitt Romney's presidential campaign.

The story, as told by Coble, goes something like this:

Coble and Tom Petri, a Congressman from Wisconsin, were chit-chatting on the House floor earlier this week. Coble has been standing on the sidelines of the Republican presidential nomination but likes for everyone to get a chance to be heard.

"We were just making small talk about the campaign and how interesting it is one guy wins in Iowa, one guy wins in New Hampshire and maybe another wins the next one," Coble said. This was before the Michigan primary night.

Well, anyway, Coble said something to Petri like, "You know, if I would have been in New Hampshire last week, I would have voted for Romney."

Coble thought he was just making idle chatter, speculating away the time between votes.

But unbeknownst to Coble, Petri is a big Romney supporter and took his remarks a little seriously. He got on the horn to the campaign. The campaign calls down to Virginia Foxx - a Romney supporter from North Carolina - who mentions something to Lamar Smith of Texas, who is also a Romney backer.

"So Lamar Smith comes up to me...and said he was glad to hear the news," Coble said.

What news?

That he was endorsing Romney.

Oh, not so much.

"I probably won't endorse anybody because I've got constituents back home who are all over the board," Coble told Smith.

The lesson? One that a guy who has spent as many years in Washington as Coble has should know by now:

"If you open your mouth in this town," Coble said, "it will come back to bite you."