So Mr. Huckabee didn't want to risk his soul by running a negative ad (full of errors) against Romney (and of course showed it to a room full of the press who, of course, would never show it to the public).

However, it appears the ad has been running for the last day or two (via Hugh Hewitt):

Remember that ad attacking Mitt Romney that Mike Huckabee unveiled at a press conference before announcing that he wouldn't be running the ad?

Well, it turns out that the ad, which attacked Romney on a host of fronts, seems to have run on Iowa television anyway -- at least a day and half after Huck promised at the presser he'd pull it, touting his decision as proof of what a noble campaign he's run.

This morning, a reader reported to us that the ad ran last night in Cedar Rapids, on TNT, during a rerun of Law and Order. And a day of run-arounds by the local cable company and unreturned calls by from the Huckabee campaign makes it pretty clear our reader is right.

We've spent a fair amount of time trying to track this one down. First we checked in with a low-level official at the cable provider, an outfit called Mediacom. They put us in touch with the people who do their ad booking, a company called Onmedia. The people at Onmedia were friendly and helpful and went back to check for us -- but once they did, the higher-ups abruptly clammed up and stopped returning our calls.

Then we went to a higher level official at Mediacom. This official, Thomas Larsen, would not confirm or deny that the ad had run. But he did confirm that on Monday they received an order from the Huckabee campaign to yank an ad -- and that the ad hadn't in fact been yanked until today.