Like everyone else who craves the truth about Mayor Rob Ford and the now-dormant video that appears to show him smoking something that looks like crack cocaine, I want to see the video.

It could validate what Star investigators Robyn Doolittle and Kevin Donovan reported. It would reaffirm that the mayor is a serial liar. And it would end the speculation that the current drug-dealing owners of the video are so afraid of losing their lives that they turned it over to the police, or worse, to the Fords.

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Still, the Star made the right call in not paying for the cellphone recording — not when the owners are demanding $40,000, $100,000, $200,000, depending on who they are trying to hit up.

If the newspaper had done so, the Star would have become the story. The narrative would go something like, “The Star paid $100,000 to drug dealers to get dirt on the mayor. Tsk. Tsk. Tsk.”

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All the correct claims of journalism in the public interest would not stem the torrent of criticism — especially from media outlets that have been less than vigilant in their pursuit of the mayor’s indiscretions.

Can’t you hear the Brothers Ford going off on that? “Bunch of maggots” — the mayor’s description of journalists investigating his tumultuous term in office — would have been tame compared to the names the pair would have conjured.

As it turns out, the mayor and his brother are capable enough of self-destruction. Journalists simply have to report their shenanigans and refuse to go away until they give account.

If and when the video surfaces, it will raise a quagmire of questions.

What exactly is in the pipe he’s smoking? Who else is in the video? Who recorded it? Is the mayor actually seen or heard declaring homophobic and racist taunts and slurs? Can experts analyze and declare the video authentic? And a myriad other permutations.

For many of the mayor’s core supporters, the defiant Ford Nation, nothing short of an admission from the mayor would convince them he is implicated in wrongdoing. One of them, in a radio call-in show last week, said she would have to see the mayor’s DNA on the crack pipe before she believed it.

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Plumbing such a murky world, the “maggots” munch away, foraging on the rot, cleaning up the trail of putrescence.

As it turns out, efforts to secure the video the mayor says does not exist may pose more problems for the mayor than the content of the video itself.

Consider what has been reported in various media, attributed to sources, since the mayor’s claim that “there is no video.”

Police interviewed the mayor’s chief of staff, Mark Towhey, after Towhey called them to report he’d heard of a possible link between the video and the death of a man photographed with the mayor.

Towhey told police the tip came from David Price, a staffer in the mayor’s office who is a long-time Ford family friend. Price apparently told Towhey where the video might be found — the 17th floor of a Rexdale apartment.

The photograph given to the Star by a broker trying to sell the video shows Ford arm-in-arm with two men. One has been murdered; the second was also shot, but survived. Towhey was informed the video may have been the source of the conflict.

David Price, the mayor’s football coach from back in the day, is on the mayor’s staff in a murky role of “logistics.” He’s been interviewed by police.

Towhey, urging the mayor enter rehab for substance abuse, was fired a week ago, on Thursday. By Monday, the mayor’s press secretary and his assistant resigned. The mayor’s continued denials ran counter to their advice.

That’s enough to sink any mayoralty, or prompt the chief magistrate to take a pause and speak forthrightly to the public, via a waiting, massing media. But Ford thinks he can tough it out.

“Business as usual,” he says, as his travails make it to CNN and NBC and around the world.

Encrusted with a sense of entitlement and invincibility, they feel they don’t have to answer to anyone.

So, perish the thought of an apology, repentance, resignation, or attempts at redemption.