Is this just Joe Arpaio’s latest ploy for money?

Making a desperate leap for Donald Trump’s coattails — or maybe just an excuse for another fundraising drive — Joe Arpaio is asking U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions to investigate why voters tossed him out of office in 2016.

The 86-year-old ex-sheriff, now a candidate for the Senate, has decided that Barack Obama’s Justice Department had it in for him.

He’s not alleging that the Russians were involved — just G. Murray Snow, the federal judge who ultimately found Arpaio guilty of criminal contempt of court.

“Concerns regarding rampant corruption within the FBI and DOJ, as seen leading up to the 2016 presidential election, require a thorough investigation, and prosecutions as deemed appropriate,” his attorney, Mark Goldman, wrote in a June 1 memo to Sessions outlining the dastardly plot.

And the fundraising letter announcing Arpaio’s effort to root out that corruption will go out in five, four, three ...

Once Arizona’s most popular politician, Arpaio has become Arizona’s most delusional politician. Apparently, it has never occurred to him that after 25 years voters were just sick of the Joe Show.

Consider the trend, the one started long before Obama came onto the scene.

Arpaio glided into office in 1992 with 57 percent of the vote in the wake of a botched mass-murder investigation and a promise to professionalize the office and serve only one term.

He then did nothing of the sort. Instead, Arpaio brought us pink underwear, green bologna and prisoners in tents, and people loved it.

In 2000, he won a third term with 66 percent of the vote.

In 2004, he was re-elected with nearly 57 percent of the vote.

But in subsequent elections, his shtick began to wear off.

In 2008, his support dropped to a still-respectable 55 percent.

In 2012, he squeaked into a sixth term with just 50.66 percent of the vote. And he had to raise $8.5 million — much of it from out of state — to do it

Arpaio didn’t need a presidential plot to lose to Paul Penzone.

He lost because years of controversy finally caught up to him — from ham-handed political corruption investigations that went nowhere to sex crimes shelved because there was no one to investigate them.

From always rising taxpayer tab for his mistakes to his arrogant refusal to obey Snow’s order to stop his immigration patrols because they violated the law.

In 2016, Arpaio drew just 43 percent of the vote here in the state’s most Republican county.

Now the 86-year-old sheriff is running for the U.S. Senate — seeking both adulation and the redemption that President Donald Trump’s presidential pardon apparently didn’t give him.

Spurred on, I’m guessing, by his handlers who are seeking neither a Senate seat nor redemption but the commissions that come from their ongoing, unending national fundraising campaigns for Arpaio.

Arpaio is in a three-way race for the Republican nomination for the Senate. He can’t win. He can, however, serve as a nice money tree worth shaking one last time.

And so comes this ridiculous appeal to Jeff Sessions.

“An investigation will shine light, once and for all, on the obvious corruption within the DOJ and FBI while there is time to reverse the evil trends,” Arpaio’s attorney wrote. “If not rooted out now, the rot will spoil much of what is good about our nation.”

That ought to be good for a few bucks.