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On Sunday, people all across the country (those who were watching Meet the Press, anyway) got a glimpse of the rather unappealing choice facing Illinois voters in the Senate race this year.

Over the last eight months, this contest has been an unrelenting race to the bottom, periodically punctuated by new revelations of the shortcomings of each candidate, which can be boiled down as follows:

Alexi Giannoulias, the Democrat, is a 34-year old who appears to excel at two things: playing basketball and making loans to convicted felons during his tenure at his family bank -- which may have ended 2005 or 2006, depending on who is asking, voters or the Internal Revenue Service.

Mark Kirk, the Republican, managed to pull off the near impossible task of taking a major political asset -- a distinguished career in the United States military -- and turning it into an indictment against his character and honesty through a series of embarrassing errors and embellishments.

The less than distinguished portraits that have emerged of these two candidates over the course of the campaign have left Illinois voters holding their noses. Neither candidate has cracked over 45 percent support in any poll taken since the end of April. The last Chicago Tribune poll, taken at the end of September, found both candidates under 40% support with 17% still undecided.

One-third of voters have unfavorable opinions of both candidates, and on Sunday it was easy to see why. Host David Gregory confronted each candidate with questions about their respective political baggage, and the responses were less than satisfying.

For his part, Kirk took responsibility for the errors and embellishments of his record -- in other words he admitting lying and misleading the public -- but not before offering a lesson from his days in the military which gave off the distinct whiff of laying some blame on his staff:

"Well, I -- I made mistakes with regard to my military misstatements. I was careless and I learned a very painful and humbling lesson. This is very important to me. In my naval training as a naval officer, we are trained to take command, to be responsible, to be accountable for our personnel, for our unit and our mission. And I am completely accountable for this. And so I corrected the record."

Giannoulias fared worse than Kirk, as you can see from this exchange with David Gregory:

GREGORY: Were you aware of some of the loan activities to criminal figures?

GIANNOULIAS: Look, the way a community bank does business -- I know when you run for office, these stories get sensationalized. When a bank decides who to give a loan to, they look at the credit worthiness of the borrower. They look at the credit score of the borrower. They look at the appraisal value of a property. So any bank -- of course, there are some individuals that -- with colorful pasts that we don't even want to do business with, but that doesn't represent the thousands of people --

GREGORY: My question, Mr. Giannoulias, were you aware that there were crime figures getting loans from your bank? You were a loan officer there.

GIANNOULIAS: As I continue to mention, as I continue to say, if I knew now what I know -- if I knew then what I know now, these are not the kind of people that we do business with. But that's not --

(CROSSTALK)

GREGORY: You're saying you didn't know? You didn't know. That's the easy question. Did you know that they were crime figures that your bank was loaning money to?

GIANNOULIAS: As I've said, we didn't know the extent of that activity. But again, if you look at --

GREGORY: But you knew that they were --

GIANNOULIAS: If you look at any bank, an even bigger bank, you're going to find hundreds of individuals.

GREGORY: That's not what I'm asking. Did you know that they were crime figures that you were loaning to?

GIANNOULIAS: I didn't know the extent of their activity.

This last response struck such an implausible note that later in the broadcast the liberal columnist Joe Klein said incredulously, "I don't think I've ever seen a politician say anything like that before," and David Gregory speculated to Peggy Noonan that the answer might "dog him" through the rest of the campaign.

The irony is that this contest between two flawed political lightweights is shaping up to be of huge significance nationally. Illinois is currently one of a small handful of Senate races that will decide whether Democrats will return to Congress with a Senate majority or whether the Republicans will win an astonishing 10 seats to capture control of the chamber. Kirk currently holds a tiny lead over Giannoulias in the RealClearPolitics Average, but all polls are well within the margin of error.

The bad news for Illinois voters is that there's still three weeks left of mudslinging in this nasty, hapless race. The good news? There's only three weeks left.