Election 2024 may go down in history as one of the nastiest, lie-tossing, AI-influenced, trash-talking series of campaigns one has ever witnessed.

And that’s saying a lot.

But we’ve always held that Sampson County folks stayed just above the fray, even with the heady elixir of being able to hide behind social media and not look people in the eye when repeating untruths that, quite honestly, most sane people realize aren’t based in fact.

Then the reports started coming in about campaign signs — on a local level.

The first reports came early, about two months ago, in fact, when the signs of a local newcomer to the state House race discovered that some of his signs had been ripped in half and left to rot away in the grass.

We noted that vandalism in a published photo whose caption detailed the fact that defacing or destroying a campaign sign is a misdemeanor crime. In other words, it’s not just child’s play.

Things seemed to die down after that. Until last week.

Yet another report came in just before early voting began, this time from an incumbent who said campaign signs were being uprooted and tossed aside like garbage, replaced with a challenger’s sign.

Then Saturday, yet another report came in that one person was stealing signs while another was working late into the night hammering signs into the ground and apparently causing disturbances at nearby homes. Complaints also surfaced about signs that weren’t placed within required spaces designated by the state Department of Transportation.

And this was only day four of the start to Early Voting.

The sign vandalism and thefts are just another indication of how far elections, and the campaigns that precede them, have come from the dignified contests of years ago, where people might not agree but they did so without malice.

While we are watching Americans and Sampsonians at their best as they exercise their right to vote in what appears to be large numbers early on, the underbelly of it all is the sophomoric behavior of people we assume to be adults.

If the hate-spewing social media mongrels aren’t bad enough with their lewd and sometimes satanic posts, we have to contend with vandals and thieves who think it’s OK to destroy or steal possessions that belong to someone else.

Perhaps they think it’s cute; perhaps, sadly, they think by removing a sign from the opposing party it will somehow help their cause and their candidate; perhaps it’s just people being the poorest reflection of themselves.

Unfortunately we believe it is likely a combination of all three.

We have less than three weeks to go before Election 2024 will be in the record books. As Americans, as Sampsonians, as human beings, we can let the final days of these campaigns show the better parts of ourselves or we can live up to the reputations we are quickly earning as liars, thieves and people-bashers.

If we can’t stop ourselves from posting venom on social media — and we sincerely hope we can — the least we can do is stop vandalizing and stealing campaign signs and let this election play out at the ballot box where it should have played out all along.