Things were going so swimmingly for ol’ Scranton Joe. Until they weren’t.

We might not want to admit it, but Joe Biden had been on a bit of a winning streak before this week’s realities set in. The Democrats had rammed through that $1.7 trillion omnibus obscenity, inflation seemed to be cooling a bit, and Biden had just returned from a bipartisan photo shoot with Mitch McConnell and a box-checking photo shoot in the freshly sanitized border town of El Paso, followed by a North American summit in Mexico City.

On a superficial level, all of these things made him seem, well, presidential — at least to his base of low-information voters. All the while, Republicans were airing their dirty laundry and giving the mainstream media plenty of fodder as they fought to name a House speaker.

But then, with the speed of a pounded gavel, the GOP seemed to get its act together. And then, yesterday, when word came that in addition to stashing classified documents in his Penn China Biden Center he’d been caught storing them in the garage of his Wilmington mansion, the weight of impropriety and double-standardism forced his wingman attorney general to slap him with a special counsel.

That special counsel is Robert Hur, a career Beltway type and the right-hand man of weak-kneed FBI Director Christopher Wray. Yes, it’s true that Hur clerked for former conservative Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist and served in the Trump Justice Department, but that doesn’t tell us much. He was also the top federal prosecutor in Maryland, and the last constitutionalist turned out the lights and left that state years ago.

He must seem like a friendly to Team Biden, especially in light of the hyper-partisan piece-of-work special counsel they sicced on Donald Trump.

“Classified materials, next to your Corvette?” asked a rightly incredulous Peter Doocy from Fox News. “What were you thinking?”

To which Biden fired back: “My Corvette’s in a locked garage, okay? So it’s not like they’re sitting out on the street. … As I said earlier this week, people know I take classified documents and classified material seriously.”

DOOCY: “Classified materials, next to your Corvette? What were you thinking?”

BIDEN: “My Corvette’s in a locked garage, okay? So it’s not like they’re sitting out on the street.” pic.twitter.com/w3D7THLxah

— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) January 12, 2023

He’s right about that: People know he takes classified documents. Seriously.

Biden’s White House counsel has already spit out a predictable statement: “We are confident,” said Richard Sauber, “that a thorough review will show that these documents were inadvertently misplaced, and the President and his lawyers acted promptly upon discovery of this mistake.”

No one knows how Hur’s investigation will unfold, or how long it’ll take, but it’d be highly unusual — and, we think, highly suspect — if he stuck tightly to the ridiculous talking point of “inadvertently misplaced” documents. The history of special counsels is one of long leashes and fabulous fishing expeditions — and there are plenty of places to cast a line where the Biden Crime Family is concerned. If Hur closes up his investigation in short order while Jack Smith is playing proctologist with everyone in the Trump administration, it won’t stand with the American people. There must be a modicum of fairness here.

In any case, we’re not so sure the “locked garage” defense is gonna cut it for Joe. Especially when we know that Biden’s drug-addled, influence-peddling son was living there at the time.

What strikes us as most troubling are the connections between Joe Biden, the Penn Biden Center, and the millions in anonymous Chinese dollars that funded the enterprise. UPenn got millions from the Chinese, for example, and Joe Biden has apparently hauled in nearly $800,000 from Penn for — for what? Not teaching a single class?

Lastly, there’s the timing issue of all this. Remember, Team Biden knew about the first batch of these documents nearly a full week before the midterm elections. But not a peep. That smacks of a cover-up, and it demands a special counsel’s attention.

Otherwise, we’ll know the fix was in.