No one can say for sure whether Energy Minister Angus Taylor or someone in his office falsified a document designed to paint Sydney's lord mayor Clover Moore as a climate change hypocrite. But one thing is clear: they may as well have. And it may yet happen again. Because this whole unseemly affair goes to show that, if you want to do something like this, you can absolutely get away with it.

Let's remind ourselves of what we know happened: Taylor's people furnished The Daily Telegraph with some hopelessly wrong figures about City of Sydney councillors' air travel habits.

They were dutifully turned into a hatchet job on Moore, whom News Corp has long despised. But once it was revealed the numbers were cooked, the whole thing backfired and the cops were called in to investigate.

There ensued a long back-and-forth as to how the fake document came to be: Taylor insisted it was downloaded from the council's website, the council reckons that's impossible. Taylor issued an apology to Moore, and along the way his staffer Josh Manuatu was outed as the backroom boy who planted the story.