Mark and Patricia McCloskey, the St. Louis couple facing felony charges for pointing their guns at protesters who had trespassed into their private neighborhood, were one of the stars of the Republican National Convention last month, and they’re taking their message of law-and-order and support for the Second Amendment on the road in the weeks before Election Day.

Originally the pair were scheduled to appear this week at a rally in the Pennsylvania town of Northampton Township, but town officials pulled the plug on the event a few days ago over their stated concern that attendance would be greater than the 250 people allowed under Gov. Tom Wolf’s coronavirus mitigation orders.

A federal judge on Monday ruled that Wolf’s orders, including limits on crowd sizes, were unconstitutional, but even before that order had come down, the Northampton County Republican Committee announced a new location for the campaign event.

“These people are real,” Gloria “Lee” Snover, who chairs the county party committee, told lehighvalleylive.com. “They have an experience, they have a story to tell.”

The event will now be held in Lower Saucon Township’s Town Hall Park pavilion from 5:30 to 8:30 p.m.

It had originally been planned in Palmer Township on the same date and time, but that township last week rejected the event over fears the publicity would push the attendance beyond 250 people, the limit Pennsylvania has put on public gatherings during this stage of the coronavirus pandemic.

A pair of Northampton County GOP Facebook posts last Friday blamed the rejection on “radical progressive Democrats” and “cancel culture,” but said it “had a Plan B all along,” which turned out to be Lower Saucon. In fact, Snover told lehighvalleylive.com that there was a Plan C ready in case their backup in Lower Saucon also fell through.

“You never know what’s going to happen,” she said.

According to Snover, the county party chairwoman, they’re not expecting more than 250 people to attend the rally, which does make you a little suspicious of the motives of the officials in Northampton County in denying the permit for the event. Pennsylvania is once again shaping up to be a battleground state in this year’s elections, and the Lehigh Valley area was one of the most closely divided areas of the state back in 2016. I suppose it’s possible that Biden supporters on the Northampton Township town council wanted to keep the McCloskeys away, but it sounds like the local GOP was determined to hold the rally one way or another.

So, if you’re in the Lower Saucon area on Thursday afternoon, you can swing by the Town Hall Park pavilion between 5:30 and 8:30 p.m. to greet the McCloskeys and hear what they have to say. There might be a handful of protesters there as well, but given the small numbers of attendees at Joe Biden events, I can’t imagine that a lot of his supporters are going to turn out to heckle the St. Louis gun owners.