Issa called me early on Tuesday morning. “Hey, we’re in the news,” I said to him, maybe too glibly. “I’ve had better weeks,” he said. And then, in my hostage-video voice, I told him I would not help him in his investigation. Issa seemed to expect this and appeared to be just checking a box with his call anyway, a brief nonconversation that bought him the right to say he had talked to the reporter in his subsequent description of his inquiry. We spoke for about two or three minutes. I told Issa that I did not think Bardella was a bad guy or that his intentions were malicious. Later that morning, Issa called Bardella into his office and fired him.

New stories popped online. The Huffington Post’s political tip sheet said the following: “A book about the incestuousness of Washington — written by a man everyone incestuously calls ‘Leibo’ — incestuously got someone fired.”

People were talking to and about me as if I’d uncovered some amazing journalistic trove, as if getting a bunch of suck-uppy e-mails that reporters had sent to a Hill flack was like getting slipped the Pentagon Papers. Yes, reporters suck up, especially here, as Jack Shafer, then of Slate, pointed out: “If sucking up to important sources were a crime, 95 percent of all Washington journalists would be doing time right now.” Colleagues kept egging me on to publish as many of their peers’ e-mails as I could possibly fit into the book. “A book that looks at the D.C. media nexus and doesn’t offer someone a measure of embarrassment would be like a film on the desert showing no sand,” wrote Clint Hendler in The Columbia Journalism Review.

Chad Pergram declared on FoxNews.com that the Bardella story would “reverberate for a while in the halls of Congress” and would “stand as an iconic tale of someone who rose and fell in one of the most unforgiving arenas on the planet.”

The iconic tale dazzled everyone like a snowflake, then quickly dissolved.

A few weeks after Bardella was fired, I kept running into people who said they’d seen my name mentioned somewhere but did not remember exactly why. Bardella was finding the same thing. The life cycle of public disgrace had been reduced to almost nothing, and what’s left after it exhausts itself is just a neutral sheen of notoriety. Bardella received a call one day from a producer for CNN’s “Anderson Cooper 360°.” They were interested in Bardella coming on as a “Republican strategist” to discuss how the so-called birthers were questioning whether President Obama was actually born in the United States. Bardella said the producer told him they were looking for “new voices” to put on the air. He said he would be interested. They did a pre-interview, he told me, but the birther spot fell through. They agreed to keep in touch.

Bardella and I got together at the end of May. He asked me to meet him at a cigar bar downtown called Shelly’s Back Room. He shared a private humidor there. I agreed to meet him in the middle of the day. He told me he had talked to some people about jobs: one with a conservative policy group bankrolled by the billionaire Koch brothers, another with a P.R. shop in town. He had also talked to Jonathan Strong, then a reporter at The Daily Caller, a start-up Web site that was co-founded by the libertarian talking head Tucker Carlson. Strong had worked on the Hill as both a staff member and reporter, which is how he came to know Bardella — who had forwarded me some of Strong’s e-mails over the months. One sequence in early February stuck out in my memory.

“Favor,” Strong wrote in his subject line. He explained in his e-mail that The Daily Caller was compiling some promotional materials for advertisers. “I have been tasked with getting some quotes from Members about how they read and enjoy The Daily Caller,” Strong wrote. “Is this something you could help me out with?” This struck me as cozy even by D.C. standards: a Congressional reporter asking a member of Congress to lend his name to his publication’s promotional copy. Bardella was happy to help. He asked Strong what he wanted Issa to say. “Just like, I enjoy reading The Daily Caller with some kind of mild variation on that theme,” Strong wrote. “I read it daily, my staff stays updated by reading etc.” Strong added that “my bosses are on my case about it.” He had his response from Bardella in minutes:

“Not only has The Daily Caller become one of Washington’s must-reads of the day, but it has found its place in leading a daily news cycle that changes throughout the day. I can’t tell you how many times my staff has sent me breaking news that originates with reporting from The Daily Caller — Representative Darrell Issa.”