The recent television trash ad attacking Gov. Maggie Hassan on the issue of opioid abuse is the worst kind of electioneering, though it was entirely foreseeable.

It involves an outside group, One Nation, spending more than $4 million for ads telling New Hampshire voters that Hassan dropped the ball on the state’s opioid crisis.

Not that One Nation cares a whit about New Hampshire or its people. They just want to damage Hassan in her U.S. Senate race with Sen. Kelly Ayotte.

The fact is, all of New Hampshire was asleep at the switch for years on this issue, which is one of the reasons prescription drugs and other opioids were able to infiltrate the fabric of the state.

However, Hassan and Ayotte have each gone to great lengths to try to position themselves as the better anti-addiction candidate, to the point that it brings to mind the old slogan for Lending Tree: "When banks compete, you win."

There are no winners in the battle against addiction, but each candidate has aggressively sought funding to battle the problem since it has come to the fore of public consciousness in the state. One Nation’s ad suggesting otherwise is ridiculous and an affront to thousands of people who have been touched by drugs like heroin, fentanyl and others. The group is merely attempting to shamelessly exploit the issue.

"For this outside group to come in and put this ad up and make a partisan political issue out of a real-people issue is disgusting, in my opinion," Dave Lang, of the Professional Firefighters of New Hampshire, told WMUR. Lang’s organization is supporting Hassan.

He’s correct, and the people of New Hampshire have a right to be indignant.

Ayotte, for her part, asked the super PAC to pull the ad, but One Nation refused.

To some extent, Hassan has herself to blame for the unfair attack, because she could have prevented it.

Back in February, Ayotte suggested that the two candidates sign the so-called People’s Pledge as a way to limit the influence of outside money in the Senate campaign. It would have provided that the candidates agree to donate money to a charity of their opponent’s choice if outside groups ran attack ads – as much as 50 percent of the cost of the ad – like the one from One Nation.

As we said in an editorial at the time, Ayotte and Hassan "don’t have to subject New Hampshire voters to a trip to the gutter, either, and a proposal floated by Ayotte would go a long way toward avoiding that ugliness."

A similar pledge was effective in the 2012 Massachusetts U.S. Senate race between Scott Brown and Elizabeth Warren, though Brown refused to sign on to the People’s Pledge when Sen. Jeanne Shaheen asked him to do so during their 2014 New Hampshire race for the U.S. Senate.

Regrettably, Hassan declined Ayotte’s offer, a decision that cleared the way for an onslaught of attack ads like the one from One Nation. It certainly won’t be the last, and it may not even be the worst.

But Hassan has less room to squawk than most when the chickens that are coming home to roost were hatched of her own refusal.