In his statement to the legislative inquiry (which was supposed to remain confidential but promptly released to the press by the McCain campaign) Todd Palin admits that he’d been trying to get his trooper brother-in-law fired for years. But he insists, improbably, that that didn’t have anything to do with the subsequent dismissal of the guy he and Gov. Palin were pressuring to fire him. That, and he too says, Walt Monegan, the Commissioner of Public Safety at the center of the story, was not fired but rather resigned.

In one of the odder parts of the deposition, he seems to have implied that two reasons Monegan was actually fired were for emailing the governor reports that she’d driven with her newborn son without a car seat and that he didn’t have a state plane available enough for her trips.

For those of you keeping score, the Palins’ purported rationales for firing Monegan are tellingly similar to those originally put forward for firing those US Attorneys — vague and barely consequential complaints that no one ever seems to have mentioned before the press started asking questions, peppered with occasional defenses of the reasons for the firing which they claim aren’t even the real reasons.

And oh yeah, he wasn’t fired. He was reassigned but decided to quit.

With any luck the voters will spare the country from this intemperate, thuggish man.