Delaware Gov. Jack Markell (D) apologized for sending out a picture of an unidentified woman in bondage gear from his official Twitter account Thursday.
The tweet was intended to be harmless, boilerplate politician stuff: "At Warner E.S. in #WilmDE to announce new initiative to support many of #netDE's most disadvantaged students."

Here's the tweet, via Politwoops:

But things got a little weird. The photo attached to the tweet was an apparent screengrab of a photo of a woman in bondage garb:

Markell — or the person running @GovernorMarkell, anyway — swiftly deleted the tweet and apologized on Twitter. "An inappropriate photo was inadvertantly [sic] sent out earlier. We are looking into how this occurred but apologize to anyone who was offended," the tweet said.

An inappropriate photo was inadvertantly sent out earlier. We are looking into how this occurred but apologize to anyone who was offended.

— Gov. Jack Markell (@GovernorMarkell) September 4, 2014

The governor's office released a fairly inscrutable statement blaming the mix-up on the photo link, which Markell's staff said had been accidentally altered somehow:

During this morning's event, a tweet was composed with a link to what was supposed to be a picture that had just been uploaded to the internet of the Governor's education announcement. While the tweet was being edited, the auto-generated link for the picture was inadvertently altered. As a result, the picture linked to the tweet was a random, unrelated, and inappropriate picture that has been on the internet since 2010, and not the just-uploaded picture of the event. The tweet was deleted and we apologize for the error.

The lessons here are don't compose tweets too quickly and there is a lot of odd stuff on the internet. We just wish the accidental link had been a cat video.