He's gone already, and none of you even appreciated him. You'll post those links to retrospectives, maybe a few YouTube clips. But face it: Most of you weren't even real Devin Nunes fans.

The House Intelligence Committee Chairman is off the Russia investigation, going out as he came in, riding a blaze of self-indictment. If the Republican Party can never condemn the opposition without inadvertently precisely describing what it wants to do or is already doing, Nunes' statement today was a masterpiece of the form:

Several leftwing activist groups have filed accusations against me with the Office of Congressional Ethics. The charges are entirely false and politically motivated, and are being leveled just as the American people are beginning to learn the truth about the improper unmasking of the identities of U.S. citizens and other abuses of power. Despite the baselessness of the charges, I believe it is in the best interests of the House Intelligence Committee and the Congress for me to have Representative Mike Conway, with assistance from Representatives Trey Gowdy and Tom Rooney, temporarily take charge of the Committee's Russian investigation while the House Ethics Committee looks into this matter. I will continue to fulfill all my other responsibilities as Committee Chairman, and I am requesting to speak to the Ethics Committee at the earliest possible opportunity in order to expedite the dismissal of these false claims.

In short: I am a right-wing activist masquerading as an agnostic investigator, and my politically motivated actions have become a liability.

It's perfect. You could've stopped and smelled the roses twisting up from the D.C. night soil like a damn Guns N' Roses logo. You could have taken in a whiff of what Nunes was shoveling and accidentally piling up around him. You're going to wish you appreciated Devin Nunes more.

Nunes was a splendid character. That a California Republican chairs the House Intelligence Committee represents another sublime conservative pairing of a job held by a person uniquely capable of annihilating its purpose. With Nunes off the Russia probe, we may never see his like again. He bears a passing resemblance to Michael Scott from The Office, but he executed every move with the aplomb of Wile E. Coyote holding up an "eep" sign as the shadow over him grew larger.

He was wonderful.

Getty Images

In any other time and place, he would've been forgettable, another bog-standard meatsuit incanting conservapieties without room for circumstance, history, nuance, or self-awareness—just a mouth on an infinite loop like the emergency broadcast system, repeating the only things it knows with the hope that they eventually pass into the axiomatic.

He was elected from a deep red nugget of the California central valley, in part because he wasn't from big-city Fresno. California's drought was the government's fault; everyone in the EPA was a "Maoist." To save healthcare, we had to remove as many people from it as possible. When it came to the Benghazi committee, he delivered the goods, keeping the word "Benghazi" in the newspapers while Hillary Clinton campaigned for president.

But, to quote The Stranger from The Big Lebowski: "Sometimes, there's a man, well, he's the man for his time and place. He fits right in there."

He bears a passing resemblance to Michael Scott from 'The Office,' but he executed every move with the aplomb of Wile E. Coyote holding up an "eep" sign.

In a time when conservatives governed from any place other than the well-armed root cellar of the most paranoid members of their base, Nunes might have had a different path. But districts gerrymandered to the deepest scarlet, forcing representatives like Nunes out on a plank, where one step toward the center leaves you falling off the edge of the known universe. Bipartisan cooperation and openness is now something that happens only when the legislative majority ticks down to five seats or less. Fate, that monster, gave Devin Nunes two hands and took everyone else's off the wheel.

This wasn't a problem in the Obama era. Nobody really minded that you can only speak in an antiquated tape loop when all you have to say is "no." But fate really fucked Nunes. It put him in charge at exactly the same moment that he could actually do whatever he wanted. There's a joke here about how horrifying choice must be to someone like him, but empathize, for a moment, with the sheer terror of being a lifelong political champion of individual initiative and then cruelly, at long last, being forced to think for yourself.

Nunes thought wrong. By now you know that he served on Trump's transition team and, when it came time to investigate the Trump campaign, he not only didn't recuse himself but essentially declared war on anyone bringing him information about the people he was investigating. When the captain, the commissioner, the mayor, and the newspapers all demanded to see him make progress on a crime that scandalized the city, he walked to the anonymous tipline, tore the cord out of the wall, and announced his intention to subpoena the phone company.

Getty Images

Then Nunes set a land-speed record for Stooge behavior. Not a Roger Stone-type Stooge, but a "knock the wealthy dowager over the bannister with her own rolled-up Persian rug"-type Stooge. Nunes might look like Michael Scott, but he's Curly all the way down.

The man bailed out of an Uber in the dead of night to go to the White House to be briefed by the White House on material the White House thought would exculpate the Trump campaign—the people he was investigating—by blaming the Obama administration for legally collecting intelligence. The next day, he briefed the press twice and contradicted himself about what he found. Later, he lied about needing to go to the White House for a secure facility, lied about just being "on the grounds," then the Uber story came out and his mouth dried up like Tom the cat chugging a glass of Alum before eating Jerry the mouse.

It's an unsexy thought for those energized by the notion of facing down the Thousand-Year Reich or a McCarthyism Do-Over, where the leftists get to be the bullies, but we should enjoy every Nunes. We've already lost our first, best one. Not every Republican can be a world-historic goblin-boob like Louie Gohmert.

Until the natural order reasserts itself and something like liability sends the GOP leadership back to leading and the GOP representatives back to saying "no" like toddlers confronting a world of pointy things, you should take this all in. If nothing else, you'll want a story to tell your kids when they grow up and lose their ability to be the only people in America that people like Devin Nunes can fool.

This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io