Given the way media pundits and party hacks alike have been going on, you'd think Moses himself had just come down from Mount Sinai with freshly chiseled holy tablets. Instead, it's merely Justice John Gomery back from his family farm, carrying not so much the Ten Commandments (that'll have to wait until February), as a 1400-page doorstop of a report.

After $80 million, enough sordid televised melodrama to put The Young and the Restless out of business, and a whole second report yet to be tabled (or perhaps "fork-lifted" would be more accurate), it's time to consider what actually has been accomplished with that sort of public coin.

The optimist would suggest we now have a non-partisan, objective appraisal of what happened when, and perpetrated by whom with regards to the $355 million sponsorship scandal. But anyone with so much as a modicum of news awareness knows that Ottawa is littered with reports, studies, position papers, and rudely scribbled cocktail napkins that have done more for the pulp and paper industry than they ever have for substantive change in the hallowed halls of government.

While initially seeming like a stunning act of integrity, Paul Martin's decision to open his party up to a public vivisection of the first order looks more and more like the self-serving whining of a twelve-stepper in the middle of a testimonial. See, we've admitted to our problems, we've apologized to those we've hurt, and gosh golly gee, we're working hard to set the guidelines so that we never do it again. But like any self-serving personal improvement nut, the fun is more in the talking than the doing.

Seeing his popularity numbers sinking faster than a lead balloon, Martin has hit the airwaves to remind people that he has acted, canceling the federal program in question, as a drunk might testify to swearing off dinner liquors. He's suing, banishing, and last but certainly not least, scaring people, siccing his bull-like Treasury Board President, Reg Alcock, on the civil service in an attempt to achieve through provocation and belligerence what leadership hasn't.

Both Auditor General Sheila Fraser and Gomery himself have stressed that it wasn't so much a lack of rules and guidelines that lead to this fiasco, but a case of people not following them -- indeed working outside them -- that was at fault.

On this score, Martin has done nothing. As Gomery has pointed out, the main problems lay in running the program directly out of the Prime Minister's office, and the existence of a civil service culture where through fear, apathy, or self-interest, people looked the other way while rules were broken. Have we heard Martin suggest that he is going to stop running the country out of his office, a PMO just as centralized, if not more, than it was under Chrétien? Will he be replacing Alcock anytime soon, a man who has reportedly brought people to tears with his abrasive, intimidating style?

If they don't fall off the proverbial wagon by Christmas, it will be a miracle.

But the Liberals are by no means the only ones taking this oh-so-expensive report into their self-serving arms while ignoring the problem at hand.

Smiling Jack Layton started off sounding like a pint-sized version of Martin Luther King, Jr. as he pounded the pulpit over Liberal greed and deceit, then shifted his hypocritical gears, happy to prop up those same dishonest, fraudulent schemers as long as he gets another backroom concession on health care, or at least some extra face time on the nightly news.

And watching Stephen Harper chasing his Prime Ministerial dream feels more like seeing Golem of The Lord of the Rings fame grasping for his "precious" than it does a man looking truly concerned about fixing the broken cogs of government.

Consider the timing of the new Conservative "Accountability Act." If Harper, playing the integrity card for the umpteenth time, is so vehemently concerned about the issue of government corruption, why did he not bring forth his new ideas last spring, or over the summer? It certainly wasn't that he needed to see Gomery's actual report, as the ink was barely dry on the good judge's tome before the Conservatives brandished their new plan for a brighter governmental future.

Political opportunism, perhaps?

So, for $80 million we get a very expensive political beach ball, something for MPs to play with or hide behind when it suits. For the Liberals it's an excuse to talk, for the NDP it's an excuse to take, and for the Conservatives it's an excuse for Stephen Harper to hallucinate about becoming Prime Minister.

Seem worth it to you?