Like Mike Hendricks [1], I've often wondered what it is Matt Blunt had in his emails that he seems so intent on hiding at all costs.  In fact, I've even posted here [1] about it and suggested that the finding out what was in those emails was the "most important" question.  Hendricks spends his entire column today asking the same thing:

What secret Blunt and his top aides want to protect, we still don’t know. But keeping it from becoming public was and continues to be all-important. ...

Just what is Blunt trying to hide by refusing to turn over the e-mail tapes that those two bureaucrats refused to destroy?

Certainly not the fact that his administration engaged in a cover-up of something. That we’ve known for months.

Now, as I said, I'm as guilty as anyone of focusing in on the nature of the documents hidden instead of the hiding itself.  But something about reading Hendricks' explicit formulation (and apparent endorsement) of that concept in print makes me suspect that I've been very wrong to do so.

Why?  Because upon deep examination, I believe it is practically impossible that anything we might find in any of Matt Blunt's emails could be any more embarrassing, more illegal, more damaging or more unacceptable than the behavior in which we already know he and his administration have engaged. 

Think about it: if tomorrow the Blunt administration suddenly released every email it has ever sent or received so that all of us could dig through in search of the embarrassing nugget that catalyzed the entire fiasco, would it at all minimize the seriousness and gravity of what the administration has already done?  Would it change the fact that our state's highest ranking elected official engaged in a series of acts intended to destroy public records and coerce subordinate employees into taking steps that everyone knew would violate the law? 

Of course not. 

So why should any of us waste more time worrying about what may or may not have been in Matt Blunt's emails (and, let's face it, tapes or no tapes we can't be sure at this point that critical pieces of the historical record weren't deleted or destroyed) when the greatest indictment of his character is already proven beyond anyone's doubt? 

The great cliche of scandal is that it's never the initial act that sinks a politician, but rather the subsequent effort to cover up that act.  Yet the political press risks entering a perverse phase in this case in which the truly appalling and illegal cover up is already essentially apparent, but the focus is shifted to a furious search for (what may be) the minor precipitating peccadillo. 

All of us should be careful not to miss the forest because we're looking feverishly for a certain tree.