Steve Pearce, the GOP-tea party candidate for the House 2nd District seat in New Mexico, is in a tight race with freshman Democratic Rep. Harry Teague. The race is one of the 37 Democratic seats Real Clear Politics has designated a toss-up this year. Teague won the seat last time with a robust 56 percent to 44 percent margin — despite the fact that McCain-Palin won the district handily.

Pearce actually held this seat from 2002 until he dropped it to run for the U.S. Senate in 2008. Like almost all Republicans in this “wave election” year, he has the wind at his back. He also recently received a coveted Facebook endorsement from Sarah Palin.

Like Sarah Palin, Pearce is a birther. He is also either an idiot who believes what he reads in right-wing junk emails or, if he knowingly bases his campaign talking points on spurious facts in these spurious emails, he is, like Palin, a liar:

STEVE PEARCE: My position is that Barack Obama raised the most significant questions himself. He said, after he came to the U.S., that he traveled to Pakistan. Now at the point that he traveled to Pakistan it was not legal to go there with a U.S. passport. And so he, himself, raised the greatest questions. I think that those questions need to be asked.

In fact, that particular lie was given a “Pants on Fire” rating by nonpartisan Politifact.

Here’s that the junk email says:

“Pakistan was on the U.S. State Department’s ‘no travel’ list in 1981,” read the e-mail. Therefore, “when Obama went to Pakistan in 1981 he was traveling either with a British passport or an Indonesian passport.”

It is true that Barack Obama visited Pakistan during summer vacation from college in 1981. According to Politifact, however, the underlying allegation in the email is a lie:

The most effective chain e-mails, like the best lies, are built on an incorrect but seemingly plausible “fact” that they follow to what seems like a sound conclusion. In this case, the “fact” on which the entire argument rests is that Pakistan was on a “no travel” list in 1981. If that were true, Obama would either have had to use a different passport or enter the country illegally and request his passport not be stamped, as some Americans have done over the years to travel to Cuba.

After a thorough investigation, Politifact found that there was no travel ban on Pakistan in 1981. The Reagan State Department had issued a “travel advisory” around that time, but it is by no means illegal for an American citizen to ignore a travel advisory. For example, there’s an advisory in effect right now affecting all of Europe but Americans are free to travel there if they choose.

Oh, and not surprisingly, Pearce is a virulent homophobe who believes that gay marriage leads to polygamy (although it’s unclear whether he means it will lead to gay polygamy or “opposite” polygamy and/or polyandry) and who wrongly predicted in 2008 that when gay marriage was legalized in California, every gay man would marry a man with HIV so that the person with HIV could get health insurance coverage — because you know how tricky those uninsured gays with AIDS can be. He also falsely claimed that adopted children of gay parents were rising up across the country and suing their parents on grounds that the parents forced them to take part in a social experiment, when in fact there is no evidence of that. So, as you can see, like Sarah Palin, Steve Pearce is nuts.

Real Clear Politics puts the polling average for the race at 46.3 percent for Pearce and 44.3 percent for Teague.

Follow Harry Teague on Twitter: @Harry4Congress