(Commenters: Please don't traffic in rumors here. There's a record that is fair game, of course, but I'll delete stuff I find out of bounds.)

State Rep. Geoff Simpson, D-Covington, said in an e-mail to supporters today that domestic violence charges against him have been dropped, and he plans to run for re-election. Simpson wrote:

The unwarranted charges that were brought against me recently have been entirely dropped due to there being no evidence of any wrongdoing.

The charges came earlier this month after an altercation between Simpson and his ex-wife. He agreed to step down from his chairmanship of the Local Government Committee until the issue was settled.

Simpson suggested in his e-mail that voters in his district may not have heard the last about the charges.

I am certain the Republican machine is gearing up with negative attacks, but the voters have rejected personal attack campaigns against me before and will see through them again.

ADD: You can read the court order dismissing the charges here. The prosecutor's office said it no longer believed had enough evidence to press charges. And, court papers say:

In addition, based on the alleged victim’s stated intentions for calling 911 at the time of the incident, there is no evidence that the alleged victim was calling 911 to specifically report a domestic violence incident or that the defendant would have reason to believe that she was calling to report domestic violence.

I just talked with Simpson. He said police were called for "assistance in a dispute about what property she could take from my house."

No crime was committed. I should never have been charged in the first place because she didn’t even say there was domestic violence.

Simpson said he supports the state domestic violence law that led to his arrest, even though charges were dropped.

I’ve thought a lot about this the past several weeks. I don’t like what happened to me and I didn’t like going to jail with all the unpleasantness associated with that. But I think that’s better than the alternative.

The alternative, he said, is having police show up at a domestic violence call and be told by the alleged victim that there was no crime, only to find later that someone had been seriously injured or even killed.

The full e-mail is after the jump.