Plea to my publisher: Buy it.

Buy that video which allegedly shows Mayor Rob Ford smoking crack.

Because somebody will. And if that somebody happens to be an ally of the mayor or just a Ford junkie with deep pockets, the purported evidence of Toronto’s chief magistrate sucking on a crack pipe will disappear — locked in a vault, burned, erased.

Then, all deniability would be plausible.

Related:

· Councillors urge mayor to address drug video allegations

· Mayor’s brother breaks uncharacteristic silence

· Is this too much for Ford Nation?

· Time for mayor to step down: Editorial

At this point, Ford’s I-DID-NOT scoff carries scant persuasiveness. He is a proven and serial liar. He’s a drunk driver. He was once found by Florida cops in possession of a joint. Yet none of that apparently amounts to a big deal in the zealous constituency, the confederacy of dunces, which is Ford Nation. The deeper he sinks into slop and swill, the firmer their resolve to defend and exculpate. Many have clearly bought into the conspiracy theory — character assassination by Toronto Star — that Ford has utilized, clumsily but with sufficient effect, among those predisposed to seeing calumny in the media, especially this newspaper.

Also from TheStar.com:

· Tim Bosma: Police remove excavator from Dellen Millard farm

· Federal government doing business with companies once involved in bid-rigging

· The Internet is a stalker’s best torture device: Mallick

It’s an addiction, really, this fealty for Ford: see no scandal, hear no scandal, speak no scandal.

So I say that this newspaper has an obligation to lead by acquiring the video that has thrice been seen by two of its top journalists. I trust their powers of observation completely but others, scrambling for a toehold of denial and disavowal — or merely caught with their reporting pants around their ankles — do not. Thus they sneer. It comes cheap, the snark; no need for any professional investment. In Toronto, pack journalism doesn’t growl; it mewls.

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The video will not come cheap. It was originally offered around for $100,000 after the co-scoop, Thursday/Friday, by the Star and U.S.-based website Gawker.

It is purportedly in the possession of drug dealers who claim to have been go-to providers of narcotics for the mayor and other unidentified notables in this city. Trafficking with traffickers is distasteful and unethical but, in these specific circumstances — the video as commodity — not illegal, not immoral and definitely justifiable.

For heaven’s sake, police pay snitches for information. Crime Stoppers offers cash rewards for tips leading to an arrest. Chequebook journalism may be dicey — mainstream media look down their noses at whores for news — but there are times, rare instances, where the end justifies the means. Further, the Star would be doing so up front, in the open, transparently.

This jaw-dropping footage of Ford — or his doppelganger, or a cleverly Photoshopped version of the mayor — must not be allowed to fade away or, worse, destroyed by the mayor’s Praetorian Guard acting with or without his knowledge and approval. I will give Ford the benefit of the doubt — not that he deserves it — and assume his jackboots haven’t been deployed to beat the bushes and back alleys for the trail of the tape.

If I were one of those drug peddlers trying to cut a deal with the highest bidder, though, I’d be looking over my shoulder right now. Don’t have a clue what the cops meant by “monitoring’’ the situation and smartphone video evidence of an individual smoking crack cocaine wouldn’t be near enough to support a charge. Anyway, how rigorous do you think the Toronto Police Service will be in pursuing allegations that the mayor is consorting with known drug dealers?

There’s been no indication the entrepreneurs had attempted to use their purported smoking gun for the purpose of extortion from the mayor. They don’t seem the sharpest coke knives in the drawer, although smart enough — if you accept the allegation — to capture the mayor on iPhone, not just inhaling blissfully, whilst baiting Ford into making homophobic and racist remarks.

It’s a veritable cornucopia of grounds for, if not impeachment, then resignation. At the very least Ford needs to either step up with a more credible denunciation of the allegation or step down while the matter is thoroughly investigated — though I suspect this job will fall to reporters rather than the forces of law and order.

The long weekend is over. The Ford saga-without-end rumbles on, precisely where it was when the story broke late Thursday night.

How can the mayor even consider brass-balling his way through this, just being Carry On Ford, a slapstick politician mocked — and in many cases already indicted — around the world? There are urgent matters on the agenda at city hall, starting with the casino vote on Tuesday that Ford had tried to head off. If Ford’s colleagues on council can sit around debating a casino or anything else while their mayor stands accused of doing crack, then they’re as in-denial dopey as he is and I’d want to know what they’re smoking, too.

I want to see the video. I want its authenticity tested. I want the purported evidence protected.

Ethics shmethics, boss.