Also, while I am... unsure of what to think about the whole thing, I do recall that basically, if he killed himself instead of going to jail, somehow, that ended up so that his family would still be elligible for his pension pay out, or something like that.

Yep, ok, I'm not nuts:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R._Budd_Dwyer

Death benefits

Since Dwyer died in office, his widow Joanne was able to collect full survivor benefits totaling more than $1.28 million (equivalent to about $3.63 million in 2025), which at the time was the largest death benefit payment ever made by the Pennsylvania Municipal Retirement System. If Dwyer had been sentenced, state law would have prohibited the payment of his state-provided pension benefits.[14][100] A spokesman for Dwyer suggested that he may have killed himself to preserve the pension benefits for his family, whose finances had been ruined by legal defense costs.[101]