The little witches, ghosts, goblins and vampires were out on Wednesday night, delivering feigned evil along with a laugh.

But some adult evil-doers began playing tricks long before Halloween and will churn themselves into a howling fury between now and Election Day.

We’re talking about the “super PACs” that are spending unprecedented amounts of money slinging lies and distortions via negative TV ads.

Their strategy is to hit their opponents with a barrage of last-minute attack ads, fully realizing that their victims will have little or no time to rebut the untruths before Election Day.

And if you hate negative attack ads, beware. You will see a surge of them over over the next few days.

One of those PACs, Crossroads GPS, has rolled out its latest attack on former Gov. Angus King, who is running for the U.S. Senate, and running well ahead of his Republican and Democrat opponents in the polls.

(In the interest of full disclosure, the Sun Journal has endorsed King in this race.)

True to form, the PACs have adopted all the standard tricks: find the worst photo of the man and turn it from color into a foreboding black-and-white. Then add an ominous soundtrack, in this case an eerie whistling wind.

The concerned female voice-over actor then lays out two lies and one questionable half-truth:

The first lie is that King used his position on a government task force to benefit his own wind power project.

In reality, King was appointed to the Ocean Energy Task Force, which had 21 members and convened in 2009.

The error, or lie, here is obvious: King developed a land-based wind-power project in Roxbury, Maine, and this task force was limited to ocean tidal power.

State Sen. Barry Hobbins, D-Saco, said the task force was one of the “most comprehensive, best organized and best attended” that he has ever seen.

Hobbins said King was not a driving force in the discussion and did not seek anything that would benefit his project. Hobbins also said he saw nothing in the final recommendations that would have benefited King or his Roxbury project.

A 2008 group, the Governor’s Task Force on Wind Energy Development, actually did lead to legislation that expedited the location of wind turbines, but King wasn’t part of that group.

By the way, that legislation was approved unanimously, by Republicans and Democrats, in the Maine House and Senate.

The second lie in the Crossroads ad says that, while governor, King cut funding for schools. A small parade of educators and education officials have said he did not.

Finally, the Crossroads ad says King favors a plan to cut $700 billion from Medicare for seniors.

King does favor “Obamacare,” but the plan proposes cutting $700 million from Medicare providers, not directly from Medicare beneficiaries.

This is, however, a dicey part of Obama’s plan. Those cuts would theoretically come from cost-containment programs.

If those savings prove illusive, one could argue that providers getting less funding might stop accepting Medicare patients.

But Republicans have supported cutting a similar amount of money from Medicare.

Crossroads GPS works on behalf of Republican candidates who, we presume, would make similar cuts if they won the presidency and/or the U.S. Senate.

Here’s our advice: consider every political ad you see between now and Election Day as likely wrong or distorted.

Better yet, do what about a quarter of TV watchers already do, use your DVR to “zap” those ads and spare yourself from this onslaught of garbage.

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The opinions expressed in this column reflect the views of the ownership and the editorial board.