Emilia, who told Onet.pl that she’d had a change of heart, allowed her text conversations with this same deputy minister to be published. He resigned the next day. But his boss, Minister Zbigniew Ziobro, did not resign. And the government-sponsored campaign against Polish judges continues, expanding into a full-blown constitutional crisis in the past week.

Since it began in 2015, outsiders have found this story hard to understand. The Polish court system is complex; the concerted attempt to pack the courts over the past five years and destroy their independence has been couched in heavy legal language and obscured by propaganda—about which more in a moment. But Emilia’s story provides a good starting point, because it demonstrates the real intentions of the Polish ruling party whose name, Law and Justice, already sounds not just ironic but sinister. A functioning democracy, whether in Warsaw or Washington, requires, at a minimum, the rule of law, fealty to a constitution, and some basic respect for the judges, lawyers, and everyone else who makes the legal system work. If senior figures in the Ministry of Justice, people whose salaries are paid by taxpayers, were willing to organize covert intimidation campaigns against judges, then what else might they be capable of? We may be about to find out.

Read: A warning from Europe: The worst is yet to come

Before I continue, let me declare a personal interest: I am married to a Polish opposition politician who is now a member of the European Parliament. He knows—we know—that politicized courts could, eventually, be used against us and our friends. Poland is not the United States, where courts have become ground zero for a culture war. Instead, Law and Justice leaders want control of the courts in order to protect their own interests, tilt the political playing field in their own favor, and extend their stay in power indefinitely. Pliant judges could be of assistance to corrupt government officials—recent cases reveal that there are quite a few—who want to escape prison sentences. They may also be able to help when the government uses legal tricks to take control of private media, as some of its members have openly said they hope to do.

Alternatively, politicized judges could help Ziobro, who is chief prosecutor as well as the justice minister (yes, that’s very strange even in Poland), use fake evidence to lock up members of the political opposition. There is a precedent for this: One of his colleagues, the current minister of the interior, was convicted of manufacturing evidence in a case against another politician a few years ago, when he was the head of the anti-corruption bureau. He is not in jail, because he was pardoned by the current president, Andrzej Duda, also of the Law and Justice party. Nor is that the only example. This is a team of people who have tried multiple times to use fake evidence to achieve political goals; recently a former anticorruption-bureau agent said he had been asked to help construct a fake case against a former Polish president. There is no doubt that they could do it again. An old-fashioned form of black humor—think how much reading we will all get done in prison!—is now part of Polish kitchen-table conversations and political chitchat, just like it was when I first came to Warsaw, in the 1980s.