Gov. Bill Richardson must be getting tried of all the ‘traitor’ talk coming from the Clinton camp, not to mention the myriad re-tellings in the media and blogosphere of that particularly rich story line.

But right when you’d think the issue was destined for the trash heap where inconsequential political stories go to die, the New York Times’ features a political memo  that reports that Doug Band, chief gatekeeper to former President Bill Clinton, keeps close track of who and who did not support Sen. Hillary Clinton in her quest for the presidency.

And if his memory falters, there are other Clinton friends who can recite the list in "spoken diatribes, with offenders’ names spat forth in rants, gripe sessions and post-mortems."

As the Times reports:
 

Several names and entities are common among various list makers. The lineup invariably begins with A-list members like Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico; Representative James E. Clyburn of South Carolina, the House Democratic whip; Gregory B. Craig, Mr. Clinton’s lawyer in his impeachment and trial; David Axelrod, Mr. Obama’s chief strategist; Senator Claire McCaskill of Missouri; and several Kennedys. Some members of the Democratic Party’s rules committee, the state of Iowa and the caucus system in general are also near the top.

Uncle, already. We get it. Politics is sometimes about keeping score, and the Clintons are particularly good at it. And, yes, we already knew that Richardson was getting coal in his holiday stocking this year from the Clintons.

But a question that one must ask is how did the Clintons’ so seriously misjudge Richardson? The governor of New Mexico seems particularly attuned to sniffing out opportunities that in the end help him — and maybe others. And if one were keeping score, Richardson seemed to have done exactly that in this case. He backed the winner of the Democratic nomination battle, didn’t he?