Alabama Governor Robert Bentley had a poor 2015, having divorced from his wife of 50 years in the midst of a widespread rumor that he’d had an affair with a key aide. Bentley has something to look forward to this year, though: a newly rebuilt beach house. But about that.

The beach house in question is a governor’s mansion on the state’s Gulf Coast which, as the New York Times explains, was built in the 1960s as a retreat for the state’s First Family. But it never quite caught on among Alabama’s governors, whose primary mansion is a pony-sized White House knockoff in Montgomery, and it has been in disrepair ever since getting trampled by Hurricane Danny in 1997. So now Gov. Bentley is going to fix it. The project began in December and is scheduled to be finished in late-May. But how is he fixing it, and why?

The first part of that question is not up for debate, though the answer has spurred a debate of its own. In order to procure the roughly $2 million needed to refurbish the tattered palace, Gov. Bentley will dip into one of the two $25 million grants given to the state of Alabama by BP as penance for the Deepwater Horizon explosion in 2010.

The distastefulness of a state governor souping up a beach house via funds nominally dedicated to repairing a vital environmental region after a historically damaging disaster is obvious to everyone involved. Bentley tells the Times that “it’s a state-owned property, and it is our responsibility to repair state-owned properties.” He also says that “the needs have been met along the coast,” though the idea that the effects of the oil spill have ceased after five years is faulty. He also argues that if the mansion were somewhere in the rest of backwater Alabama instead of on the beach nobody would care.

But it is on the beach, and that specific detail has piqued the interest of one official close to the money: state auditor Jim Ziegler. Ziegler’s theory is that Bentley isn’t fixing the mansion because of a responsibility to the state or so that, as Bentley states, it can be used for events that will foster economic growth in Alabama. Instead, in a statement written before Christmas, Ziegler offered that Bentley’s interest in the mansion stems from the fact that the governor lost possession of two beach homes in the divorce from his wife.

“The governor now has a personal need for a Gulf place, so only now is he restoring the governor’s mansion at the gulf,” Zeigler wrote in a statement.

Bentley now has to refute not only that he’s immorally diverting money, but that he’s doing it for a deeply personal reason. The governor attempted to provide evidence contrary to Ziegler’s theory to the Times, saying that his office has been working on refurbishing the beach retreat for “a long time.” To that end he showed reporter Alan Blinder plans dated August 27. That date is especially curious because, as Blinder notes, Bentley’s wife filed for divorce one day later.

In a separate statement to AL.com, a Bentley spokesperson said that the governor recently purchased his own property on the same peninsula that houses the rundown governor’s mansion. Maybe that is so, but it doesn’t obscure an unchangeable fact as Bentley moves on from the twin loss of his previous beach homes: one plus one equals two.

[image via AP]

Contact the author at jordan@gawker.com.