At times, even conflict can't save a tedious but important story

It was kind of fun to write about the transit controversy for a while. It's not fun anymore.

Gov. Rod Blagojevich and the Illinois legislature are nothing if not good for providing newspaper copy. But, as lawmakers get set to return to Springfield to put a dramatic semicolon on the long undone work of the 95th General Assembly, only two words come to mind.

Enough already.

Except, of course, that the "already" part is such a ludicrous term for the dolorous transit controversy weighing down state leaders that accuracy demands sway over form and begs us edit the phrase to simply: Enough!

Sitting in front of my word processor now, I'm having a hard time remembering when we first began writing about the funding crisis then looming for Metra, Pace and the Chicago Transit Authority. Was Honest Abe still president? Was Ralph Bunche being awarded the Nobel Prize for bringing peace to the Mideast? Had George Ryan gone to prison yet? It's hard to say. The controversy seems to have been with us forever.

And, I have to say, it was kind of fun to write about for a while, the petulant boy governor shaking his little fists in the faces of the two humorless old saws, presumably of his same party, as they threw their autocratic influence in wildly different directions in their separate houses. This was absurdist Illinois government at its dysfunctional best.

But it's not fun anymore. Like watching the last season of "24," every time you think the plot could not get more ridiculous, someone inserts a bizarre new twist whose sole value seems to be to prolong the tedium.

Today, we are led to believe, lawmakers are called back to Springfield -- uhh-gain, as Forrest Gump would say -- possibly to finally end this madness with approval of the governor's amendatory veto of the so-called solution to the transit-funding crisis. It wasn't enough for Blagojevich that surly, discordant lawmakers were able, in a third 11th-hour try, to reach agreement last week on a regional sales tax increase that would bail out the three mass-transit agencies. His back to the wall because of his no-tax-increase pledge, he had to show how, in his words, to "take a lemon and make lemonade" and add a twist of his own to the controversy.

That twist might at first seem to be a master stroke of public relations brinkmanship, daring lawmakers to reject the notion of free bus rides for senior citizens. But the late lemonade has left a sour taste in the mouths of some lawmakers, many of whom weren't all that thrilled with the bailout in the first place, and it is far from guaranteed that the legislature will come to Blagojevich's table and endorse his gambit today.

Of course, if they don't, they'll have just three days in which to act to stave off the long-predicted transit "doomsday" and Daily Herald reporters and photographers will again find themselves wandering bus and rail stations to chronicle the disdain and disgust of mass transit customers whose emotions and pocketbooks have been pawns in their leaders' three-way power play.

If the stakes weren't so serious, one could almost wish for doomsday to just arrive and be done with it. With Metra having raised its fares 10 percent in spite of the so-called bailout, the specter of disaster, although far from benign, seems almost endurable, and we could move on to some new story line in state government.

Literary experts correctly assert that a central conflict is the key to a great story, and the story of Illinois' descent into tragicomedy certainly has conflict. But, as an editor, I'm still hoping it's not too much to ask that lawmakers actually get something done today so we can all move on.