We can at least agree that today’s indictment of Paul Manafort was unshocking. The man is to sleazeballs what the steam drill was to railway steel drivers. Read it through and, if you’re broke, you can feel almost grateful because at least you haven’t wired nearly a million dollars from offshore accounts to U.S.-based rug dealers in order to decorate your multiple homes.

Then there is the indictment of George Papadopoulos, a young man, not yet 30, who has had to face a special sort of terror that only the entire U.S. criminal justice bearing down on you can bring. That was the bigger surprise. Evidence suggests he might be a doofus, for lack of a better word, but there’s more to be learned. We’ll come back to him. I didn’t mean to forget Paul Manafort’s protégé Rick Gates, also indicted today, but there’s a lesson there in picking your mentors wisely.

In the big picture, how much closer are we now to something solid and incontrovertible on collusion between Moscow and Donald Trump? The preliminary answer seems to be: not much, at least for those of us in the general public. Only Special Counsel Robert Mueller and a few of his colleagues are likely to have a better answer, and we can only speculate about how much they themselves understand. Sometimes, if you’re in Mueller’s place, you already know how the puzzle fits together, more or less, and you just need to get the respective pieces to stop denying things and lie down in their places. Sometimes, you don’t know what to make of the pieces or whether they add up to anything, so you’re still examining them. Mueller could be in either state.

So let’s break things down, starting with Manafort, the man who should remind us all that if you’re getting something for free, then you’re the product. There are three possibilities for why Manafort chose to work without pay to elect Trump. And, forgive me, but we’re not going to include selfless patriotism among them:

1. Manafort wished to spike his general market value as an influence peddler. His greed caused him to forget how much attention you get in such a role, and he was undone. This would leave Trump mostly untouched.

2. Manafort, rich on paper but financially imperiled in real life, was managing Trump’s campaign in order to be of service to Moscow and get money. This hypothesis has been explored by T.P.M.’s Josh Marshall, who notes that intelligence agents “look for people who are crooked and people who are desperate.” If this were borne out, the extent of collusion with Moscow would be stunning, and it would probably destroy Trump’s legitimacy, even if it didn’t directly implicate him.

3. Manafort was one of many people on the Trump campaign—including former General Mike Flynn and Carter Page and Trump himself—flirting with Moscow for financial reasons. This becomes a scandal as big as option two or bigger, depending on the degree of collusion.

Option one still seems likeliest, because if two or three were the story, then we would expect to have seen more evidence of favors done for Moscow during the campaign, whether in the form of transmission of secrets or adjustments in policy pronouncements. (Reports that Trump’s campaign intervened to soften the stance of the Republican platform with regard to Russian aggression in Ukraine seem to be incorrect.) But all three are technically possible, and Mueller knows better than we do which is strongest.