She was, she says, elected by accident. Margaret George, perhaps cruelly dubbed “Scotland’s laziest councillor”, has decided not to run again this May.

Last time round the Tory threw her name in to the ring only because she thought there was no chance of winning. A Conservative, after all, had never before represented her ward, Irvine South.

But win she did. And it was, she says, “horrifying”. Speaking to news site Ayrshire Live, Ms George claimed she couldn’t even go to church without being harangued about bins.

Politics, it turned out, was not nice. “I’ve never worked in an atmosphere like that where everybody hated each other and I was getting more and more stressed,” said Ms George, responding to criticism of her lack of surgeries.

Grim, right? Thousands of people have registered to contest one of the more than 1200 seats in Scottish local authorities this spring. Inevitably, some of them – such as Ms George – are simply not up for the job.

Critics of the Conservatives will be quick to ask how Ms George passed vetting, not because she is a bad person, but because she was clearly an unsuitable one.

After all, the party has elected, in Prime Minister Boris Johnson, a leader unusually unfit for public office, a man who was selected to fight a Westminster seat despite a well-documented track record of straight-up lying.

But it is not just Tories who stand candidates who should be nowhere near power, national or local. All parties do.

We should be asking if they have got their vetting right. Parties sometimes fail to catch even the most obvious and public problems, such as candidates publishing incoherent or offensive views on the internet. Is this not the easiest bit of vetting: looking at Twitter, Instagram or Facebook?

This last week alone reporters dug up a series of stories about contrarian and extreme statements made on social media by candidates.

Often these outbursts echo the most dysfunctional and radicalised elements of very online Scottish politics. It is Twitter bubble patter.

So a Tory hopeful in Falkirk, it emerged, had absurdly called Nicola Sturgeon a “dictator”. Claire Brown also suggested a long convicted child murderer was the victim of a conspiracy.

Even more alarmingly, a Dundee SNP candidate was revealed to have declared 9/11 to be an “inside job” – carried out, she said, by the CIA and FBI. Siobhan Tolland had also called for the arrest of Benedict XVI for child abuse, referred to him using the ‘c’ word and complained that her throat was “sair wi shouting at the Pope” at an Edinburgh protest.

Meanwhile, Labour put up a woman for Perth and Kinross council who had as her Twitter banner a statement that she stood with Soldier F, a paratrooper charged in connection with the Bloody Sunday Massacre. Vanessa Shand had also claimed, falsely, that the SNP planned to impose a Catholic monarchy. She has quit.

The Tories have spoken to Mr Brown about “trusting unverified information”. The SNP said Dr Tolland – who is, astonishingly, on the party’s national executive committee – had apologised for her tweets which it said she had made during a difficult period of her life.

These cases are not isolated. They raise awkward, uncomfortable issues we should talk about.

Scotland, thanks to the independence referendum, was one of the first places in western Europe to have intense and radicalised online politics.

Some of our very online hyper-partisans have spent more than a decade wading in a cesspit of normalised extremism, where abuse and conspiracism are ubiquitous. Some of them have fried their brains; they are Twitter zombies whose judgement is skew-whiffed beyond repair but who still want your vote.

Yet there will also be candidates, even those approaching middle age, whose entire political and personal lives are essentially documented in public. A good few will have expressed stupid views which they no longer hold when drunk or stoned, or during periods of emotional distress. What should parties do with these people? And how can vetters tell them from ‘current’ zoomers?

The big parties have various ways of spotting bad candidates. For example, the SNP, which is the best resourced of all our political organisations, has a national approval system, with key word searches carried out on the internet footprints of potential candidates. Still people with embarrassing profiles get through. How?

Well, there are a number of issues here. Parties can be nominating thousands of people. And – and here is another of those awkward truths – there is a shortage of quality people who want to be councillors. As Ms George’s experience shows, it is not always a pleasant job, and it pays very badly. So do parties turn a blind eye to flaws in their candidates, especially “paper” ones? Maybe.

Ask a party worker or a councillor what makes a good candidate and they often say the same thing: somebody who chaps doors. Why? Well, activists who canvas, who meet real voters, are less likely to live in a social media bubble world where extreme or hyper-partisan posts are rewarded with likes and shares. And they know what actually bothers people, even if this is just when the bins are collected.

Very online partisans, of course, are just one kind of crank which parties need to root out. The fact they are not always succeeding in doing so should worry us.

But we should not catastrophise. Most of the folk who will ask for our vote in May, whether we agree with them or not, will be public-spirited goodies. It is for their sake, as much as our own, that we need to ask our political system to do better at sifting candidates. Because we really do not want the obviously inappropriate, incompetent or even extreme elected to our town and county halls. Even by accident.

Our columns are a platform for writers to express their opinions. They do not necessarily represent the views of The Herald.