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The defining moment in Victor Marx’s surreal quest to be Colorado’s governor came a few weeks ago, during a rare sit-down interview with a journalist. Halfway through the session, Denver TV news anchor Kyle Clark asked the candidate how many people he had killed.

The question isn’t as outrageous as it sounds. Marx, a former Marine and the founder of an evangelical ministry, talks a lot about violence and killing. He presents himself as a globe-trotting spiritual warrior, freeing women and children from the clutches of terrorists and sex traffickers. His social media posts and podcast appearances teem with references to narrow escapes and secret missions, encrypted comms and safe houses, as well as accounts of the horrific childhood sexual and physical abuse he says he endured from his sadistic stepfather, who he also says forced him to kill a man when he was 7 years old.

After an agonizingly long pause, Marx responded to Clark’s question. First, he said that the killing orchestrated by his stepfather was the only one he committed as a child. “But I’ve been in other situations where possibly people or persons died as a result of me defending myself in other countries,” he said.

“Do you think that you’ve killed people as an adult?” Clark asked.

“Does it matter?” Marx replied.

Clark never got a straight answer to his question. The jaw-dropping exchange soon went viral and cast a national spotlight on Colorado’s over-the-top governor’s race. In the end, it probably doesn’t matter how many people Marx claims to have killed, since none of the three GOP candidates in the race have a prayer of winning the job in a purple state that’s getting bluer all the time; Colorado has elected only one Republican governor in the past 50 years. But the emergence of Marx, a political unknown, as the purported front-runner in Tuesday’s primary—he has raised more money than his two rivals combined, and the sparse polling seems to favor him—has alarmed party insiders and stoked fears that his campaign could imperil other Republican seats in the statehouse and Congress, plunging the fractured, marginalized party into chaos.

“I’ve never seen anything like this,” says Dick Wadhams, a longtime Republican political consultant who has guided several key U.S. Senate campaigns. “Marx is the kind of candidate who will bring down a bunch of other Republicans if he ends up winning the primary.”

Marx’s two primary opponents have baggage of their own. State Sen. Barbara Kirkmeyer is the closest thing to a moderate in the race, having worked on bipartisan legislation and joined prominent Democrats in opposing the recent commutation of the prison sentence of disgraced election official (and Trump ally) Tina Peters. But more than a decade ago, Kirkmeyer led an oddball movement by rural county officials to secede and form a 51st state. The other candidate, state Rep. Scott Bottoms, is........

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