Oh what a tangled web we weave,

When first we practise to deceive! —Sir Walter Scott, Marmion

Perhaps it's perversely fitting that Sir Walter Scott's most famous lines are routinely, and wrongly, attributed to William Shakespeare. For this is a tale not just of deception but of misattribution: the Conservatives' attempt to claim sole credit for a gusher of public spending which was, in fact, forced upon them by a global financial meltdown.

Of course, even if you get the attribution wrong, Scott's quote is still right: once you start trying to pull the wool over people's eyes, you're weaving a tangled web which…tends to unravel. This time, the wool started to unravel at the office of a Nova Scotia Tory MP, Gerald Keddy. Sample press release from his website: "KEDDY RECOGNIZES YEAR OF THE LOBSTER IN HOUSE OF COMMONS."

Well, forget the lobster. For Keddy, surely, it's now the Year of the Photoshopped Cheque.

Of course, it must have seemed like a great idea at the time: why not stick the Conservative Party logo onto a giant fake stimulus cheque so that the photo makes it clear who to thank? And, at first, Keddy was unrepentant. Then, once the CBC put the story on The National, he turned contrite - but too late. By then, a host of Googlers had turned up a blizzard of photos of beaming Tories posing with their own versions: cabinet ministers posing with cheques seemingly signed by their wealthy selves (e.g., Peter Van Loan.) Ministers posing with cheques purportedly signed by Stephen Harper (e.g., Bev Oda.) And MPs across the land posing with their own names where the real source should be — us: the taxpayers of Canada.

The Treasury Board rules on this kind of thing say government money should be handed out in a "non-partisan" fashion. And the Tories quickly conceded that sticking their logo on such cheques was over the line. But their names? Why not? The party line was that the names fell just this side of that wobbly, vague and much-crossed line.

But, in the end, even the Tories didn't buy it. It didn't pass the smell test. Voters don't like to have the wool pulled over their eyes and they know who's really signing the cheques. So, judging by the contrite quotes from half a dozen Tory MPs, all swearing they wouldn't do it again, we won't be seeing too much more of this.

Seen in perspective, of course, Logo-gate seems like small potatoes compared with scandals past. After all, the Tories were merely pretending the money was theirs. They didn't actually make it theirs, as the Liberals did under Jean Chretien by steering contracts to advertising companies who promptly made handsome contributions to the party. But, even given that glaring difference, Logo-gate had a palpable political impact. Remember when all of Canada was agog at the prime minister's prowess at the piano? Already, it seems like a long time ago. One week, you're getting by with a little help from your friends and, the next, your friends are embarrassing you by plastering their names, and yours, on the taxpayers' money.

The long-term impact will take longer to calculate. Have the Tories sullied their own narrative — the one where the new Tory brooms sweep clean the Augean stables of Liberal sleaze? We'll see. But even that web got tangled: cleaning the Augean stables turned out to be nothing but trouble, even for Hercules. See, according to the legend, the big man was tasked to clean the dung-filled stables in a single day. He only did so by a miracle — diverting two rivers to wash out the filth. Even so, it is said, the stable owner, Augeas, refused to pay up by giving Hercules a tenth of his cattle. So it's always hard to get the credit for being the new broom.

The legend doesn't say if Hercules stuck his party logo on the broom and posed for pictures.