As of the writing of this editorial, we do not yet know the winner of the Mark Warner versus Ed Gillespie contest for Warner’s United States Senate seat. Yet we do feel confident projecting that come Wednesday morning there will be one clear winner in this campaign — and that will be the television viewers who have endured months of mud-slinging and name-calling by both sides.

Political television advertisements can be used by a candidate to do one of two things, either inform the public of his or her virtues or inform the public of his or her opponents’ flaws. In today’s political climate, the former is usually abandoned early in a contest in favor of mercilessly employing the latter. We have difficulty recalling the last time one of the candidates actually gave us a meaningful reason to give them our vote, other than the fact that by doing so we would not be wasting our vote on his opponent.

We learned from the Gillespie campaign that Warner is an Obama sycophant who voted with the president an astounding 97 percent of the time, including when he astoundingly supported Obamacare. For their part, the Warner campaign did a masterful job drilling into our collective consciousness that Gillespie is a Republican attack dog that lobbied on behalf of such evil empires as Enron while lining his pockets with the spoils of our own misfortunes.

The whole thing is enough to make one sick.