The unexpected general election in June was a particular boon for fish and chip shops in East Dunbartonshire, because by all accounts they received enough Liberal Democrat election literature to coat their product for months to come.

Almost as soon as the election was called, and before the SNP had got itself properly into gear, residents across the constituency were being blitzed with multiple leaflets featuring glossy images of the local Lib Dem candidate Jo Swinson.

Eyebrows were naturally raised as to how a party that has been on the fringes of British politics since 2015 was in such an advanced state of readiness for a snap election, was so lavishly funded, and managed to move itself so effortlessly into pole position in a constituency where it had been comfortably outpolled by both the SNP and the Tories in May’s local elections. It almost felt as if this was not a Liberal Democrat campaign at all, but rather a Rolls Royce pan-unionist campaign that had opted to use Swinson as its local proxy.

The disquiet over the Lib Dems’ road to success has hardly been lifted by the revelation that the party only barely stayed under its legal spending limit for East Dunbartonshire, and did so by failing to deliver a mind-boggling 93,000 leaflets. That’s such a large number that people intuitively find it hard to accept that those leaflets did not form part of the Swinson Mountain that actually accumulated on people’s doormats – but of course intuition is often wrong.

It’s perfectly possible that a truly obscene number of leaflets was printed off, and that a significant minority of them were withheld to stay just about within the rules. The point may never be definitively proved one way or the other (and the Lib Dems are adamant they remained within electoral commission rules), so the more important thing is what this episode tells us about the underlying state of the party in Scotland.

How did we reach the stage where a once proud, independent party could only compete by asking voters to ignore its identity, its ideology, its policies and its leaders, and focus solely on the miserable contention that “only the Liberal Democrats can beat the SNP here”?

That was the relentless message of the leaflets, which reached their nadir with a ‘letter’ from the editor of an electoral wagering website, who presented himself as a dispassionate expert in spite of being a former Lib Dem parliamentary candidate, and declared that the Conservatives had no chance of winning in East Dunbartonshire. Patent nonsense given the results of the local elections, but of course it wasn’t really intended as fact-based analysis, but rather as a self-fulfilling prophecy. And it’s highly doubtful whether the bluff would have succeeded without the other crucial component of the so-called Lib Dem campaign, namely the near-total absence of a Tory challenge on the ground.

Essentially the Lib Dems sold their souls in return for the chance to grab some low-hanging fruit. Remember that it wasn’t all that long ago that the virtual wipeout of 2015 led to a productive measure of reflection within the party, and a long-overdue realisation in some quarters that liberalism has got precious little to do with support or opposition to Scottish independence, or indeed with support or opposition to a second referendum on Scottish independence.

There was a brief, tantalising moment when it looked as if the Lib Dems might opt for the broader appeal of being neither unionist nor nationalist, but simply liberal. As the first major party to break free from the tribal divide of the 2014 referendum, they could eventually have reaped huge dividends. But to do that would have meant sacrificing the chance to quickly win back a handful of their former seats, which required the help of the Tories, and thus absolute unflinching adherence to the anti-independence creed.

Make no mistake – the non-aggression pact between the Tories and Lib Dems in Scotland was very real. There is no other way of making sense of Lib Dem victory being coupled with a poor Tory third place in constituencies with a history of Tory strength, while at exactly the same moment the Tories were coming from nowhere to seize seats that were Lib Dem-held until 2015.

The only constituency where the Tories and Lib Dems genuinely seemed to be competing against each other was North-East Fife, and it’s no coincidence that the SNP held onto that one. As part of the informal bargain that won Swinson her seat back, the Lib Dems effectively abandoned former strongholds such as Gordon and Argyll & Bute, which both look set to be fought over by the SNP and the Tories for the foreseeable future.

Whether that was a worthwhile swap is doubtful, but what is beyond question is that it was profoundly short-sighted to stake everything on a constituency carve-up in a country that elects its devolved parliament by proportional representation. The Lib Dems won 16% of the vote and 16 seats in the Scottish Parliament as recently as a decade ago. As a bit-part co-belligerent of the Tories, they won’t be repeating a result like that any time soon. Yet, from their delighted reaction to the outcome in June, they seem more than content to have won four Scottish seats at Westminster and turned that into their plateau.

To adapt Orwell’s famous line, if you want to know the future of the Scottish Liberal Democrats, just imagine a human face in East Dunbartonshire being buried under an avalanche of leaflets telling her to vote for a party she doesn’t much like to stop another party she dislikes even more. Forever.