The 1940s radio drama, This Is Your FBI, was J Edgar Hoover’s favorite show – which was understandable since he personally approved every script. A December 1945 episode, called the Bobby Sox Bandit, began with these prophetic words: “Seventeen. That’s an important and exciting age in the life of a boy or girl.”

Now the FBI has been given the sexually charged case of the “Alleged Prep-School Predator”. The stroke-of-midnight decision to let the bureau investigate Christine Blasey Ford’s charges about the 17-year-old Brett Kavanaugh was an outlandish plot twist that would have embarrassed an alcoholic radio scriptwriter. With Kavanaugh’s nomination about to be rammed through the Senate with a show of partisan Republican muscle, this one-week reprieve was the best the Democrats could have hoped for.

Think of what would have happened if Jeff Flake – the Arizona senator retiring because he is out of place in Donald Trump’s party – had not halted the rush to judgment.

We have the pause that refreshes

Trump reportedly had been scornful of Kavanaugh’s unconvincing and robotic denials in his Monday interview with Fox News. And the president, with his hard-won encyclopedic knowledge of sexual assault accusations, was said to be reluctantly impressed on Thursday by Ford’s calm, convincing composure before the Senate judiciary committee.

Then Kavanaugh – fearful that his long years as a Republican legal apparatchik would end in disgrace – came roaring and ranting back like a Trump clone in judicial robes. His demeanor (and, boy, was it mean) embodied justice about as well as Lewis Carroll’s Queen of Hearts shouting, “Sentence first – verdict afterwards.” But the public display was enough to win Trump’s slobbering embrace on Twitter and rally virtually every Senate Republican to the righteous cause.

Had Kavanaugh been confirmed in this fashion it would have inflated Trump’s megalomania to near Nero levels. With Kavanaugh on the supreme court and the last flickers of rebellion among the congressional Republicans extinguished, Trump would have felt empowered to immediately fire deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein and then quash the Robert Mueller investigation.

Instead, we have the pause that refreshes.

Cable news for the next week will be filled with angry attorneys and glib former prosecutors speculating about what an FBI inquiry will or will not uncover. Since my Junior G Man badge got lost in the mail, I am under no illusion that I can singlehandedly crack the case.

But what a week’s delay does mean politically is that Americans can think about why Ford – with no political agenda and for no financial gain – volunteered for her harrowing day in the Senate spotlight. As for Kavanaugh’s version, it does bring to mind Mandy Rice-Davies 1960s response to a prominent paramour denying an affair, “Well, he would, wouldn’t he?”

Even if the FBI fails to uncover enough evidence to derail Kavanaugh’s nomination, Ford’s brave testimony will not have been in vain

The Republican no-surrender strategy has always been predicated on Mitch McConnell’s belief that the longer voters are discussing the supreme court, the better it would be for the Democrats. Kavanaugh, with his Washington GOP establishment pedigree (George W Bush was calling senators on his behalf), was never the favored candidate of social conservatives. They championed Amy Coney Barrett, a former Notre Dame law professor elevated to the federal court of appeals in 2017, whose nomination (obviously) would not have brought with it credible charges of attempted rape.

Even if the FBI fails to uncover enough new evidence to derail Kavanaugh’s nomination, Ford’s brave testimony will not have been in vain. She has established the principle that not only will a credible on-the-record accusation of sexual misconduct be heard by the Senate, but, importantly, it will also be investigated by the FBI.

Since Trump and McConnell were forced by the arithmetic of a narrowly divided Senate to call in the FBI, the right wing has been flogging a fresh argument. As Saturday’s conservative Wall Street Journal editorial page sneered, “The truth is that no amount of investigating by the FBI or anyone else will change a single Democratic vote.”

Under this self-serving Republican theory, every supreme court nominee who has not been proven by the FBI to be a sexual monster is entitled to unanimous confirmation by the Senate. Needless to say, that will be gratifying, if sadly belated, news to Merrick Garland.