Topeka ? Last week’s abortion battle in Kansas produced more heated remarks from anti-abortion television personality Bill O’Reilly, more blistering statements from interest groups on both sides of the issue, and more leaked “evidence” against well-known abortionist George Tiller.

But from a state political observer’s perspective, the events were just another sentence in a long story.

“This is just one more skirmish of the larger war being played out in Kansas since Bob Dole beat Dr. Bill Roy in 1974,” said Joe Aistrup, chairman of the political science department at Kansas State University.

In a 1974 debate at the Kansas State Fair, Republican Bob Dole was in danger of losing his U.S. Senate seat in the first post-Watergate election when he accused Roy of performing abortions and supporting abortion “on demand.” The tactic has been generally credited with helping Dole eke out a victory and was one of the first times the abortion issue played so prominently in a campaign.

Aistrup recalled the Dole-Roy debate in relation to the recent flare-up over abortion in Kansas.

Anti-abortion groups Operation Rescue and Kansans for Life provided reporters with transcripts, video and news releases of statements of Dr. Paul McHugh, a psychiatrist and witness hired by former Attorney General Phill Kline in his case against Tiller.

In his last days in office in 2006, after getting stomped by Democrat Paul Morrison at the polls, Kline, a vehement opponent of abortion, filed charges against his nemesis Tiller, who provides late-term abortions. The charges were dismissed on a jurisdictional issue, and Morrison, who criticized Kline’s investigation into Tiller, said he would review the case and decide by the end of this month whether to pursue charges. Tiller has denied any wrongdoing.

But the delay in a decision by the pro-choice Morrison has infuriated abortion opponents who fully expect him to drop the probe into Tiller.

Enter McHugh. The former director of the psychiatric department of Johns Hopkins University Hospital in Baltimore said Tiller violated the late-term abortion law that says a viable fetus cannot be aborted unless it is done to save a woman’s or girl’s life or to prevent “substantial and irreversible” harm to a “major bodily function,” which has been interpreted to include mental health.

McHugh said Tiller’s justification for abortions for reasons such as anxiety disorder is not a legal justification. McHugh also opposes abortion.

Morrison wrote McHugh a terse letter threatening to take legal action against him if he didn’t stop talking publicly about records in a pending investigation.

But Mary Kay Culp, executive director of Kansans for Life, said McHugh’s statements would help bring public opinion to their side against Tiller.

“The more the public learns about the investigation itself and what is going on, and what is going on in Tiller’s clinic, the better,” she said.

She said if Morrison decides not to pursue charges against Tiller it will hurt Morrison when he is up for re-election in 2010.

“It’s going to inspire people to work against him if what he does doesn’t appear to be just,” she said.

But Aistrup said it wasn’t clear how the abortion issue would play out.

“Many of the pro-life groups will try to use that as additional fodder to press their case against the attorney general. Whether or not it will, you never know which issue will take hold,” he said.