Redistricting Fiasco Demands Extensive Investigation

All eyes are on the John Doe misconduct in office probe in Milwaukee where the net is expanding over a growing number of former Scott Walker aides and current appointees, and in which the boss himself has had to hire two criminal lawyers to prepare for a sit-down with prosecutors.

But I'd argue that the scandal unfolding in Madison over how election maps for legislators were redrawn last year requires an investigation where people are put under oath to ferret out the truth - - because what happened suggests there was a serious effort to withhold information from the public about how their representatives would be elected, and thus to manipulate, in secret, how the government which the people fund would be run.

* We know that nearly every single Republican legislator went to an attorney's office, got a look at the proposed redistricting boundaries for his or her district only, signed a promise not to disclose what they'd seen, and voted to approve the changes wholesale.

We know that the chief of staff to at least one prominent legislator, Neal Kedzie, the State Senator from Elkhon, twice continued this cover-up by telling a constituent that Kedzie had not signed this pledge, when, in fact, the Senator had signed.

And the only reason the existence of the secretive process was disclosed was because federal judges forced the Republicans' lawyers - - being paid for by taxpayers to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars , by the way -  - to turn over the records of the secret agreement after the documents had not been routinely disclosed, per standard courtroom procedures.

An elaborate scheme like this, set in motion by people with significant political and legal skills and willing to risk tampering with the foundations of an open government, indicates planning and execution by people at a far higher pay grade than the Fitzgerald brothers or the ham-handed State Rep. Robin Vos, (R-Rochester), who is still fumbling the explanation for who drafted which pieces of the plan and for what reasons.

Getting to the bottom of this mess may not have the display-window appeal of watching Scott Walker and his troop go down, but the stakes are at least as high.