Hoosier voters have a clear choice among candidates for attorney general this fall.

There's Republican Greg Zoeller, who has the backing of Attorney General Steve Carter and is the No. 2 person in that department.

Zoeller has promised to continue to aggressively prosecute the RICO (racketeer influenced corrupt organizations) case against the former East Chicago Mayor Robert Pastrick and his administration.

And then there's Democrat Linda Pence, who has argued against using outside counsel in that case. The attorney general's office has enough attorneys to handle that case, she has said.

What she didn't say was that she represented paving company Rieth-Riley in a federal lawsuit that resulted from the infamous 1999 East Chicago sidewalks-for-votes scandal.

Rieth-Riley, her client, paid $625,000 to settle claims in federal court that the company helped city officials conspire to divert more than $24 million in public money in that spending spree.

Rieth-Riley admitted no wrongdoing in its 2006 settlement and agreed to cooperate with investigators.

The RICO lawsuit filed by Carter four years ago brought in important outside counsel -- University of Notre Dame professor G. Robert Blakey, who helped write the federal RICO statute, and Patrick Collins, the federal prosecutor who led corruption cases against former Illinois Gov. George Ryan and Chicago patronage boss Robert Sorich, both of whom were convicted last year.

Pence planned to visit Northwest Indiana today.

Here's the question voters must ask themselves: Do the voters want an attorney who has pledged to vigorously prosecute corruption cases, or do they want someone who wasn't forthcoming about being a defense attorney in one of those cases?