Gary Imhoff reported in his DCWatch newsletter on Wednesday that Jonathan Rees, failed D.C. Council candidate, former DCist commenter and unstable creep, has died after a long illness.

I didn’t know Rees had been the kind of ill that was life threatening, but there was never any question in my mind that he was seriously mentally ill. Rees first came to our notice in 2005, when he started an ill-fated campaign to represent Ward 3 on the D.C. Council, and subsequently began posting racist, homophobic threats in our comments section against members of the DCist staff and online community. He went on to harass many of us via email for the next couple of years, often taking the trouble of building special Blogspot pages that individually accused some of us of being communists, homosexuals, or traitors. Once, he even threatened to file a specious lawsuit against DCist and its parent company, Gothamist LLC. Eventually, Rees gave up commenting here and, later, sending us harassing emails. We guessed he got bored with us moved on to other targets, but perhaps he simply became too ill to keep it up.

DCeiver has an unapologetic post up marking Rees’ death. You’re not supposed to write mean things about people who have just died, but it’s hard to write much else about someone who prided himself on being a bigot. I suppose can fairly say that Jonathan Rees was an impassioned follower of local D.C. politics, and leave it at that.