Well, if anyone had any doubt about how dirty this would get, wonder no more. The Alaska Attorney General Talis Colberg (3rd in line for the Governor’s throne should Palin win the VP slot, and Lt. Governor Sean Parnell win the House seat) has announced that none of the 13 people state employees who were issued subpoenas in Palin’s ethics investigation into the “Troopergate” scandal will testify, unless there is a unanimous vote from the full Senate or the entire Legislature.

In other words, the Attorney General has stated that nobody who is subpoenaed will show up.

Either the AG and the McCain campaign are genuinely afraid of what this investigation will uproot, or they are just trying once and for all to illustrate that the guy at the anti-Palin rally in Anchorage on Saturday who held aloft a sign reading “Bush in a Skirt” was right. My money is on the former.

Oh, and five private citizens from the Fairbanks area today filed suit to halt the investigation on the grounds that the entire thing is unconstitutional. And of course Palin herself has folded her arms, crinkled her nose and said she will no longer be cooperating in this investigation that she “welcomed” just a few short weeks before she was assimilated into the world of Republican politics on the national scale.

I keep searching for the appropriate Alaskan metaphor for overkill. Swatting a mosquito with a sledge hammer? Shooting a moose with a cruise missile? Whatever metaphor you choose, the message is the same. There’s a whole lot of legal muscle, big league strategy, and nasty DC Rovian politics descending on our poor little town in the Last Frontier. Makes you wonder what exactly there is to find, and how desperate they are to make it go away.

And, of course, there always has to be an official reason given for the stonewalling. And it’s usually a good laugh line, so here it is, from AG Talis Colberg:

“This is an untenable position for our clients because the governor has so strongly stated that the subpoenas issued by your committee are of questionable validity.”

Ahh. It would be uncomfortable to testify because the governor doesn’t want them to. Now, I get it.

The silver lining in all this? The more paper they throw, the more tantrums they throw, the guiltier they look. Long ago, Rep. Les Gara suggested to Palin that she confess to a bad judgment call, and hire Monegan back. She didn’t listen. And now the act of firing Monegan, which has gone so far to illustrate her temperament, her decision making ability, and her judgment, has come back to haunt her, with help from the McCain campaign.

There is a growing sense in the blogosphere, in local and national media, and among people I know, that the bloom is off the Palin rose.