We at Various Things & Stuff pride ourselves on accuracy, which is why we were somewhat disturbed to read Molly Ball’s story in today’s Review-Journal. It appeared to contain a salacious accusation that we’d misquoted someone!

The allegation arose in the latest dustup between gubernatorial rivals state Sen. Dina Titus and Henderson Mayor Jim Gibson. On Tuesday, Titus held a protest outside Nevada Power’s Sahara Avenue headquarters, accusing Gibson of taking a half-million dollars from the company (which he did) and helping to raise rates (which he didn’t).

Back in 2002, Gibson advised Nevada Power on how to defeat a ballot initiative that asked voters whether the Southern Nevada Water Authority should take over the power company, with a promise of 20 percent lower power rates. The initiative was purely advisory; nothing would have changed whether it passed or failed.

Gibson (and other lawyers in his law firm) received $527,000 for his services, but despite his advice, the measure passed anyway, 57 percent to 43 percent. The water authority later dropped its bid to take over the power company.

Two years later, when we discovered the $527,000 fee, we penned a column for the Review-Journal, our employer at the time, headlined “the half-million dollar man.” The Titus campaign used that headline to slam Gibbons Tuesday. But as you can see, the problem wasn’t that Gibson was helping to raise rates; the problem was that he’d agreed to do legal work for a regulated utility that did business in his city and his legal work went athwart the will of a majority of Clark County voters.

Anyway, Gibson was quoted in our long-ago column thus: “The mayor admits he did some work ‘that was tangential to the ballot question.’ Still, Gibson says, ‘I’m not sure that I was the one who did (the litigation on) the ballot questions.’”

But on Tuesday, in Ball’s story, we read this: “Gibson now says that quotation is not accurate.”

As you can imagine, we were outraged. It appears from Ball’s phrasing that Gibson was saying we misquoted him! Gibson didn’t ask us to write a correction or clarification of his quote at the time, never wrote a letter to the editor disputing our piece and never publicly challenged its veracity until now.

We hadn’t been this angry since U.S. Sen. John Ensign once lied about us to an Associated Press reporter, saying we’d retracted something we wrote about him when no such retraction ever took place.

But, good news. Gibson is no Ensign.

Dan Hart, Gibson’s campaign manager, says his candidate didn’t mean to tell Ball that we’d misquoted him. He did mean to say that what he’d said two years ago wasn’t accurate, and that he’d either misspoken or misunderstood our question. The resulting quotation was accurate, however.

Well, OK then. After all, the only thing we really have is the trust that our readers can believe the things we tell them people said. And it seems that trust is intact.

Now, back to witnessing the candidates beat each other about the head and shoulders.