Here is why.

Ten-thousand pages of court-ordered released priest abuse files counter every public statement Flynn has made about his work and role. They show, beyond doubt, that he participated in reassigning sex offenders, secretly paid off child molesters through his law firm, actively intimidated survivors, ensured sex offenders were not reported to law enforcement and successfully argued for laws prohibiting survivors from suing the church.

Flynn has accused both the Republican and Democratic Party “elite” of engineering a well-crafted campaign against him. But the indictment against Flynn originates from only one source: the senior management of the archdiocese. The files show a secretive, tight, loyal inner circle engineering the operation. They had a lawyer on their team: Matt Flynn. He was not a befuddled and clueless outside counsel. He was an inside man: giving continual direction, sometimes orders, innovating and strategizing plans, devising means of public misdirection, attacking anyone who threatened to interrupt or reveal the cover up.

Unfortunately for Flynn, the team recorded his direct involvement in real time, contemporaneous with events: copious and carefully drafted letters, memos, minutes to meetings, internal communications, handwritten notes, evaluations, victim reports, even direct admissions by offenders. Centuries-old church or canon law, with its obsession with ecclesiastical documentation, required it. These documents were kept in a safe inside the headquarters of the archdiocese called the Archivio Segreto, or “Secret Archive." Even the physical dimensions of the safe are specified.

Flynn’s activities, outside the heavily criticized decision to file court costs against victims who had to drop civil cases due to the statute of limitations, were unknown or unproven until these files were seen. Flynn tirelessly fought victims, journalists and news outlets to keep the public from seeing them.

As a lawyer, Flynn could have withdrawn his representation. Was he not ethically and professionally obligated to do so? He could have literally stopped child sex abuse.

What of the “reforms” Flynn claims to have made when he hit the ground in his new job in 1989?

Bishop Sklba, in a stunning letter dated Aug. 12, 1996, seven full years into Flynn’s tenure, writes that the team has decided to return a group of offender priests secretly back into parishes. This time, however, each will be assigned a fellow priest to check in on them. Which child molesters? Those “judged appropriate for this experiment.” In other words, Catholic children were test subjects, parishes the laboratories. Flynn is recorded having knowledge of and being directly involved in every priest case in the test group.

Albert Camus once observed that official history is written by those who make history, not those who suffer from it. Flynn's campaign is no longer one against his Democratic challengers or even Scott Walker. It's against a tragic and terrible history of suffering children in our state and his part in it.