I am usually reluctant to join in any rising chorus of criticism of our nation’s financial regulators. In general, I think the SEC, the CFTC, and other regulatory bodies do a decent job of policing our capital markets despite being chronically underfunded, structurally at risk of capture, and frequently used as a political football. (My general principle: Any regulatory agency that has to take Megabus on a business trip deserves our prayers.)

But this Bloomberg article detailing the lengths to which a team of CFTC investigators went to in order to prove that Gary Gensler, their chairman, was wrong in claiming that he had a conflict of interest in investigating the collapse of MF Global, is simply breathtaking.

The issue under investigation was whether Gensler, a former Goldman Sachs executive, was too close for comfort with Jon Corzine, the former Goldman CEO who ran MF Global into the ground last year.