Most everyone who has ever commented on a messageboard or blog has used some sort of alias. There’s not really anything wrong with that. Well, unless you’re the mayor’s press secretary and you get caught using multiple aliases to defend your boss on a popular city blog.

No, it didn’t happen here, but it did happen in San Francisco. According to an ABC 7 report on the matter, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom’s press secretary, Peter Ragone, recently got busted using aliases — also known as “sockpuppets” — on both the station’s blog and SFist, our Bay Area sister site. Ragone, who used various online personalities to defend Newsom, apparently didn’t know that matching commenters to IP addresses isn’t terribly hard. Worse yet, he seemed unaware that trying to claim that all those different names are actually all close friends posting from the same computer seems a bit of a stretch.

While we haven’t been fortunate enough to be graced by the sockpuppet comments of a mayor’s press secretary (or, looked at another way, we as a city are fortunate enough not to have press secretaries who would stoop to such behavior), we can of course can claim ourselves as the throne of King of Aliases himself, Jonathan Rees. Long story short, Rees’ prolific use of aliases in his campaign for the Ward 3 seat on the D.C. Council last year makes Ragone look like an un-tested amateur. The big difference is that Ragone is the public face of Newsom’s administration, while Rees is just another guy with a computer, an active imagination and a skewed sense of what’s acceptable and what’s just plain weird.

As for Ragone, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors has suggested that Newsom, pictured above, fire him. And we suppose his case is a good lesson for flacks around the country — if you really need to defend your boss, do it in an official capacity, and use your real name.