If you think the Republican primaries have been wild, consider South Miami.

This year’s loveless Valentine’s Day election has been full of accusations and even some name-calling, but it’s just another campaign season in the city of 12,000 with a penchant for big political drama — where a mayor was once arrested in city hall on the eve of an election and currently an ex-convict is running for commission.

Also this election season, biology-professor-turned-mayor Philip Stoddard is fending off accusations that he contaminated the city’s drinking water, fixed his students’ grades and — perhaps the most off-the-wall — that he’s a drug dealer.

It gets nuttier, with candidate Bob Welsh (a.k.a. Bicycle Bob or Bobnoxious) under attack from pretty much everyone besides the two commission hopefuls running against him in the Group 3 race.

Oh, and then there’s that ex-convict. More on that later.

Running to keep his seat, Stoddard, 53, soft-spoken and bespectacled, faces a challenge from a former South Miami mayor and former state representative, Julio Robaina (no relation to the Hialeah politician of the same name.). Robaina, 50, was mayor from 1998 to 2002, state representative from 2002 to 2010 and now co-owns a property management company.

Stoddard has had to defend the pond that he, a Florida International University fish researcher, and his wife, an architecture professor at the same university, dug in their backyard prior to his becoming mayor. An ad that recently flooded voters’ mailboxes claims the pond could be “contaminating your drinking water and endangering your health” because it was dug without a permit.

The mailer says it was paid for by Floridians for Ethical and Responsible Government, but the entity isn’t registered with the city, as the Florida statutes require.

Stoddard says the city told him at the time that he didn’t need a permit to construct the pond.

And he insists he didn’t offer good grades to students who campaigned for him, which he was accused of in a recent article in the South Miami edition of Community Newspapers.

Former Mayor Horace Feliu, whom Stoddard decisively defeated in 2010, wrote that Stoddard, “illicitly recruited his impressionable FIU students to work on his campaign. With an alleged wink and a nod assuring a good grade, they went knocking on the doors of unsuspecting South Miamians, innocently spreading their teacher’s lies and deceptions.”

Feliu had been arrested on the eve of the 2004 election and charged with accepting illegal campaign contributions. He was later acquitted.

Feliu’s complaint about the students made it to Stoddard’s top-boss, FIU President Mark Rosenberg.

Stoddard said students helped him with his first campaign, so he hired an independent grader for his classes that year. This year, Stoddard said he’s not working with any students on the campaign trail.

FIU hasn’t taken any action against Stoddard because of the complaint, according to university spokeswoman Maydel Santana-Bravo.

Stoddard would also like voters to know he is not, contrary to the rumors, a drug dealer. Stoddard says the rumor has been around since he first ran for office in 2010.

Court records show there is someone by almost the same name — Phillip Dale Stoddard — who was charged in 1981 with grand theft, trespassing and possession of cannabis. But the mayor spells his first name with only one “l,” and his middle name is Kraft. Plus, the two men’s birthdays don’t match. A Florida Department of Law Enforcement search reveals no criminal history for Philip Kraft Stoddard.