Back in the distant mists of time — the early 1970s — a young Garry Trudeau penned a Doonesbury strip where two legislators grumble over the difficulty of definitively nailing Richard Nixon. “If only he’d knock over a bank or something.” “By George, we’d have him then!”

It’s in that spirit that ODTAA notes the apparent continued tenure of one Gillian Cosgrove at the National Post, after Monday’s column.

Just how to describe the allegations in that column? We’ll start with the National Post’s attempt on Tuesday (as blogged by Paul Wells): “In the first item in a column by Gillian Cosgrove in this paper on Monday, November 22, 2004, a number of fundamental errors and intentional misrepresentations appeared. The editors regret this and apologize to all concerned.”

Intriguing, no? Even more tantalizing is the CBC story; where once there were details, there is now a big white screen o’ nothing. (Even the source code is blank.)

The Globe and Mail covers the story, but only to say it involves the Governor General, that there is some potential lawyerly footwork to be done, that an anonymous friend of Cosgrove’s says she’ll keep writing the column, and that the Post has been shedding misbehaving reporters of late.

(By the way, that page currently carries an ad for Toronto’s Trump International Hotel and Tower. Please feel free to make whatever “You’re fired” joke seems appropriate.)

If you’ve guessed that everyone’s a little freaked about the lawyer thing, I suspect you’re right, and if you think that’s why I’m not going to mention the substance of Cosgrove’s column here, I know you’re right.

More puzzling is the lack of any hint from the post about Cosgrove’s future. It seems hard to believe the paper would continue publishing her; after inspiring a retraction with a phrase like “fundamental errors and intentional misrepresentations,” you’d think all she’d get to write would be instructions to her successor on watering the philodendron in the corner.

But changing the rules of Canadian journalism is pretty much the Post’s mission statement. (Especially since “Hurt Chr?©tien” no longer has that timeless quality the best mission statements possess.) So maybe it’s no surprise that the third profound misstep by a Post reporter might not also be the paper’s third strike.

Damn. If only they’d knock over a bank or something.