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... on Pennsylvania taxpayers' $100,000 tuition money, while he and family lived in Virginia, where he still lives today.

That's not your real issue. In any event, by letting his wife and children live with him while serving the people of Pennsylvania, Senator Santorum saved about half of the cost of sending the kids to a brick and mortar PA school for political expediency.

Outside of the state provided computer (a one time cost, at probably $1,000), the actual cost probably isn't the $7,000 cited, as most of the cost of the system is tied up in overhead (network, servers, software), and the per student actual cost probably is not anywhere near $7,000. It does hurt the local district, because they foot the bill, but much less than if teh good Senator decided to sacrifice his children's well-being, sending his kids to the PA public school.

The public schools in Virginia have the same problems as public schools everwhere, and the private schools are expensive enough ($20K+) that his Senator's salaray at the time would have had a hard time supporting 5-7 of them.

This is a tempest in a teapot. We are down to Newt and Rick. Support one, don't trash the other. If you must rip on somebody, Romney or Obama will do.

From 2001 to 2004, the Pennsylvania district school paid $38,000 per year as tuition for five of his children living in Virginia all around the year, on a cyber-home school program to Rick Santorum.

Do the math yourself.

Santorum told KDKA Radio that his niece lives in and “looks after” the Penn Hills house when he’s not there. He also admitted that when he goes to Pennsylvania, where he spends “about a month per year” there, he and most of the family usually stay somewhere else — with his in-laws — while his niece and her husband keep “watching” the house:

“We have a nice arrangement there. It works out well. Candidly, we just sort of work it out. Sometimes, a couple of my kids stay over there with the niece and her husband.”

But $100,000 paid for by local property taxes isn’t nothing. So under public pressure Santorum withdrew his children from the cyber school, but refused to reimburse the Penn Hills School District, who had to go to court to get back the $100,000 – spending even MORE time and MORE taxpayer dollars to get back money Santorum never should have pursued in the first place.

The Department of Education decided to end the dispute in 2006 by paying back to the Penn Hills District School a sum of $55,000 (federal funds from taxpayers’ money as well).