As the first Presidential candidate in history whose hopes of reaching the White House had been threatened by a snarl-up at the George Washington Bridge, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie took the only option available to him on Thursday. In a two-hour press conference that could have been mistaken for a Senate filibuster by his potential G.O.P. rival Rand Paul, Christie announced that he had fired his deputy chief of staff, Bridget Anne Kelly, for lying to him about her involvement in the “traffic study” that shut down access lanes from Fort Lee onto the George Washington Bridge and brought the Bergen County town to a standstill for four days in September.

After apologizing to the people of Fort Lee, and of the rest of New Jersey, saying, “I am embarrassed and humiliated,” Christie repeatedly insisted that, until the story broke on Wednesday morning, he knew absolutely nothing of what appears to have been a plot to punish the Democratic mayor of Fort Lee for refusing to join the many other New Jersey Democratic officials who endorsed him for reëlection. “I have sixty-five thousand people working for me, and I cannot know what every one of them is doing every day,” Christie said. “But that doesn’t matter. I am responsible.”

On Wednesday morning, the Bergen Record and other media outlets published an e-mail from August in which Kelly said to an official at the Port Authority, which operates the bridge and the roads leading to it, “Time for some traffic problems in Fort Lee.” Following that explosive revelation, the normally loquacious Christie did a disappearing act, and didn’t reëmerge until his press conference, which the cable news channels televised nationwide.

Despite starting out on a note of contrition, he couldn’t prevent himself from reverting to his usual mode, which is cocky and combative. Clad in full C.E.O. garb—a dark chalk-stripe suit, French cuffs, and a red tie—he chided the reporters for trying to cut him off before he had finished, and described one of their questions—about whether he had thought of resigning—as “crazy.” “I think I’ve built up enough good will over time that the people of New Jersey will accept my apology,” he said.

That remains to be seen. Nobody doubts that Christie, who won reëlection in November by more than twenty percentage points, is an engaging and formidable speaker, and, at a moment of crisis, he demonstrated it again. In apologizing and taking responsibility for what emerged from his office, he did what had to be done. But in simultaneously putting the blame on a single staffer and saying he had no involvement whatsoever, he staked his career on the belief, hope, desperate gamble—call it what you want—that no new information will emerge to challenge his version of events. If Kelly, or anybody else, contradicts Christie and provides evidence to back up his or her story, the governor is toast.

With at least three separate probes under way, this is only the beginning of the investigative process. The committee in New Jersey’s Democratic-controlled state assembly that subpoenaed the offending e-mails from the Port Authority will doubtless keep digging. The Port Authority inspector general is already involved, and now, according to news reports, so is the U.S. Attorney for New Jersey, Paul Fishman. “I have absolutely nothing to hide,” Christie declared. “My instructions to everybody will be to coöperate and answer questions.”

Perhaps setting an example for his staffers, he stood at the podium for dozens of them. He went on so long that Fox News, which seldom likes to dwell on bad news for the G.O.P., cut away to run an enormously important story about how billionaires can exploit loopholes in Medicaid and get free coverage. CNN and MSNBC stuck with it, and their viewers were rewarded with some details about how Christie had handled the latest revelations.

He fired Kelly, a forty-one-year-old mother of four who served as Christie’s liaison to the state legislature and other government agencies, without even speaking to her, he revealed. After reading her e-mails for the first time on Wednesday, he concluded that she had lied to him last month when she told her immediate boss, Kevin O’Dowd, his chief of staff, that she knew nothing about the Fort Lee caper. “It is heartbreaking to me that I wasn’t told the truth,” Christie said. “I am a very loyal guy, and I expect loyalty in return.” Kelly had no authority to make policy decisions, such as initiating traffic studies, Christie also said. “She had no prior approval from the chief of staff, and she had no prior approval from the governor…. If she acted in a way that exceeded her authority, that’s what she did.”

The recipient of Kelly’s now famous e-mail, and the man who ordered the blockage of three of the four entrance lanes from Fort Lee to the George Washington Bridge, was David Wildstein, a former senior official at the Port Authority, who resigned in December after the initial brouhaha over the closures. Various reports have described Wildstein as a childhood friend of Christie’s. According to Shawn Boburg, a reporter for the Record who profiled Wildstein in 2012, “he was known as the governor’s eyes and ears inside” the Port Authority. Christie was at pains to deny this. “David and I were not friends in high school,” he said. “I was class president and an athlete. I don’t know what David was doing at that time.” After Wildstein joined the Port Authority, Christie conceded, he may have run into him five or six times, but he said he didn’t recall meeting with him in his office.

As of now, Kelly isn’t talking, and neither is Wildstein. (In an appearance before the State Assembly transportation committee on Thursday, the former casual acquaintance of Christie repeatedly took the Fifth, prompting the committee members to try to get him cited for contempt.) At some point, though, they and everybody else involved in this sorry tale will give their version of events. Only then will we know if the Fat Man has truly escaped. Even if he does, the scandal will plague him all the way to Iowa and beyond.

Photograph by Mel Evans/AP.