Stan Stabler and Robert Bentley

Stan Stabler, head of the Alabama Law Enforcement Agency, responds to statements made by Spencer Collier, the now former head of ALEA, Wednesday, March 23, 2016, in Montgomery, Ala. Gov. Robert Bentley fired Collier Tuesday. (Julie Bennett/jbennett@al.com) ORG XMIT: ALBIN

(JULIE BENNETT)

If Stan Stabler isn't sweating right now, he should be. There are a lot of places, maybe all of them, Alabama's top cop would rather go than jail.

And if I were Gov. Robert Bentley, I'd be sweating, too. If there's one person who could flip on him and do the most damage, Stabler would be the guy.

In game theory, it's called the Prisoner's dilemma -- when two confederates are separated by authorities, each with a choice.

Tell the truth or stick to the story.

Two weeks ago, I wrote that there is a crucial question at the heart of Gov. Robert Bentley's sex scandal -- whether Stabler, Bentley's secretary of the Alabama Law Enforcement Agency, has been telling the truth.

Most everyone in Alabama, it seems, saw the governor's disastrous press conference earlier this year, when Bentley copped to talking dirty on the phone with his senior political adviser, Rebekah Caldwell Mason, but to nothing else.

But before the governor subjected himself to that firing squad, he had his new ALEA secretary, Stabler, stand up on that same stage and deny the allegations made by Stabler's predecessor, former ALEA Sec. Spencer Collier.

Collier had gone public about what he knew of the governor's affair, which he said he first learned of from Stabler. It was Stabler, Collier said, who first brought the affair to his attention, after Stabler had seen a suggestive text message on the governor's phone.

In the press conference, Stabler denied it. And in a subsequent op-ed, published throughout the state, he doubled-down, saying that Collier was lying.

Only one of them could be telling the truth, and that has been the most important question in this whole affair -- not whether Bentley got to first base, second or all the way home with Mason.

Is Alabama's top cop a liar? Is he a crooked cop? Is he someone willing to use the power of his office for Bentley's political purposes?

This week, we got much closer to an answer.

Not only did Staber maybe lie in a press conference -- which as much as I might wish otherwise, is not a crime -- he also ordered an investigation of Collier at ALEA. The agency turned the results of that investigation over to state and federal officials for prosecution.

However, as soon as that report became public two weeks ago, some of those quoted in it have told AL.com that they were intimidated into cooperating, quoted grossly out of context or flat out misrepresented.

Then this week, the Alabama Attorney General's office said the report was a sham. The Special Prosecutions Division had reviewed the report and taken it before a grand jury. The results were as definitive as they were damning.

"In the course of the investigation, no witness provided credible evidence of criminal 'misuse of state funds,'" the press release said. "No witness provided credible evidence of any other criminal violation on the part of former Secretary Collier. Finally, no witness established a credible basis for the initiation of a criminal inquiry in the first place."

Here's the thing. The ALEA secretary is the governor's appointment and serves at his pleasure. While Collier has filed a wrongful termination lawsuit, a fair argument can be made that the governor can fire an ALEA secretary just because he wants to.

But for Bentley and his administration, that doesn't seem to have been enough. They didn't want only to fire Collier, but also to destroy him and his credibility. It looks a lot like revenge.

They say the cover-up is worse than the crime, but this time the question will be whether the cover-up itself was the crime.

That will be for a grand jury to decide, and there just happens to be one still meeting in Montgomery.