Faced with a sex scandal of breathtaking tackiness, a Chinese police district could be forgiven for feeling perhaps a flicker of relief last week when someone in the office stumbled on what must have felt like good news under the circumstances—a detail that, at last, would not add to the humiliation heaped upon the brave men and women in blue in the county of Usu.

Sure, the background of the case unfolding in the department in northwest China was unchanged and, let’s face it, unhelpful: Police Chief Qi Fang had, indeed, been found embroiled in a pair of simultaneous love affairs with two women, who worked for the police department and whom he had promoted through the ranks, while keeping them in a luxurious apartment, paid for by the public treasury. But the department came upon what it took to be a redeeming detail, and it was determined to correct the record. And so a police source made sure that the important revision was made known to China’s state press, which printed it the next morning in newspapers across the land: The police chief’s two mistresses were not twin sisters! They were just sisters.

When I read that line last week, in the China Daily, I stopped chewing my lunch and looked up, blinking, while I absorbed the full scale of it. We can call it the “not twins” defense, and there may be no more crystalline detail to capture the decrepit credibility of Chinese public servants these days, amid a spate of sex-and-corruption scandals more public and baroque than any that the People’s Republic has ever seen.

I wrote, not long ago, about the odd political significance of an orgy involving some obscure, photo-loving Communist Party officials. At the risk of tarting up an event that speaks for itself, I argued that it was a problem for Chinese leaders because it made clear the gap between the Party’s artificial solemnity and the unadorned reality beneath. Since then, more has happened, and here is a brief inventory: in addition to the police chief and his secrets of the Usu sisterhood, there was the recent case of Lei Zhengfu, an official in Chongqing who was abruptly dismissed after a sex video showed him with a woman a third of his age who had been hired by a local real-estate developer to blackmail public officials into giving out hugely valuable tracts of land. (As outlandish as those details were, they were surpassed by the sheer physicality of the gentleman in question, a man whose astonishing ranine qualities inspired a wave of Chinese parodies online.)

But let’s not get sidetracked. Onward with the inventory: There was Wu Hong, who turned up in pictures the other day wearing his uniform from the Urban Administrative and Law Enforcement Bureau, alongside a young woman in a hotel room who was not wearing much of any uniform at all. There was the local Shanxi official, Li Junen, caught juggling four wives and ten kids in the land of the one-child policy. (Perhaps the one-wife policy should have been made more explicit?) Admittedly, they start to blur: Can I interest you in the executive of the state-owned oil company in pictures with a female subordinate? Or, perhaps, the vice head of the Shandong Agricultural Department found to have signed a hand-written contract with his mistress, promising to divorce his wife by December 20th?

(I’ll skip over the non-sex ones—the latest career public servant caught wearing a thirty-two-thousand-dollar watch; the Shanxi deputy police chief under investigation for covering up his son’s D.U.I.; the Shenzhen official accused of gambling away eleven million dollars in public funds; and the son of the Beijing traffic bureau chief who is being investigated for corrupting the license-plate lottery—and mention simply that if you want more on those and more, just sign up for Sinocism, the terrific China-news digest produced every day Bill Bishop.)

The most interesting thing about the list above? Everything on there comes from the past three weeks. Not one day more. Some have argued that the surge of sex-scandal news is a sign that the new Politburo is determined to expose and crack down on the phenomenon. (Indeed, the police chief and the hapless Lei, among others, are already on their way to punishment.) Others see it as the accretion of the power of the Web. I see it as a bit of both. But exposing the epic ineptitude of public servants is not the same as rooting it out as its spiritual source: a deep-rooted culture of impunity and entitlement that has grown without boundaries for three decades. That will be a far more difficult task.

Photograph, of Lei Zhengfu, by Imaginechina/AP.