Michele Bachmann announced this morning that sadly, she will be leaving her career as a congresswomen behind.  Just six months after winning a brutal campaign to hold onto her seat as a Republican House Representative, she has declared that she would not seek another term.

“I have decided next year I will not seek a fifth Congressional term,” she said in a video released on YouTube this morning.  But why, Michele?  Just when everything was going so well! “This decision was not impacted in any way by the recent inquiries into the activities of my former presidential campaign or my former presidential staff.”

Oh…  Turns out that Bachmann is in some hot water with the Office of Congressional Ethics over allegedly misusing some money raised during her run to become president in 2012.  Oops.

“My decision was not in any way influenced by any concerns about my being re-elected to Congress,” she went on. “If I ran I would again defeat the individual who I defeated last year.”  And to be honest, she probably would.  Think about who must make up her congressional district to have elected her the first couple of times.  None of the outlandish things she’s done for the last 7 years has gotten her the boot, certainly massive campaign finance violations wouldn’t stop them from voting for her again.

At any rate, Michele may no longer be with us, but some of her more outlandish statements are here to stay.  Here are some favorites that the hard working folk at Politico curated last year:

• “And to have innocent little 12-year-old girls be forced to have a government injection through an executive order is just flat out wrong,” Bachmann said about HPV vaccines.
• “The executive director of Planned Parenthood in Illinois said they want to become the LensCrafter of big abortion in Illinois,” she said at a speech last year.  Classy and factual.
• “I find it interesting that it was back in the 1970s that the swine flu broke out then under another Democrat president Jimmy Carter. And I’m not blaming this on President Obama, I just think it’s an interesting coincidence,” she said of the Swine Flu outbreak in 2009. I knew there was a conspiracy that could be sussed out of Swing Flu—though I think we could do better than that.
• “There are hundreds and hundreds of scientists, many of them holding Nobel Prizes, who believe in intelligent design,” she said in 2006.  Who knows, maybe she was referring to the Nobel Prize winners from 1901? Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen was supposed to be a pretty religious guy.
• “Carbon dioxide is portrayed as harmful. But there isn’t even one study that can be produced that shows that carbon dioxide is a harmful gas,” she said in 2009.  Thank God she’s never started her car in her garage.

Michele, you’ll be sorely missed—though your insight won’t be…