Okay, to catch up: We started out with Lambert's catch of The Unfortunate Beach House And Its Kinky 3-Way Owners..

The short: A deputy secretary at Interior and his girlfriend, a honcho in extractive-industry enforcement at the Justice Department went in with an oil-company executive on a million-dollar South Carolina beach house.

The details: I left the first Googledive results, on the Interior dude, the resigned-in-disgrace-for-Abramov-connections Stephen Griles in comments, but for today's update this gets moved back to Page 1. So with no further ado, here's a sweet little story about Mr. Griles Justice Department Floozie and the Meat in the Oily 3-Way Beach House Sandwich, Sue Ellen Wooldridge. If that SacBee link gives you a demand for registration, fuckem and go via a Google on "castrate sheep". Why that particular search term? Glad you asked:

Wooldridge, 46, grew up on a farm near Willows, where her father was superintendent of schools. She was an honors graduate from the University of California, Davis, and Harvard Law School.

As a government official, she was regarded as tough but fair. She once told a gathering of U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service workers that "when I was growing up I used to castrate sheep with my teeth."

The suggestion that Wooldridge is linked to anything scandalous has come as a shock to those who knew her as a hard-working and committed public servant.

She is a delicate blossom of upright rectitude and unquestioned ethics, according to colleagues quoted in the SacBee. We are awaiting reports from the sheep.

However, leaving her curious taste in veterinary practices aside, what got her into Trouble in Ethicsland besides bad taste in fuckbuddies and real estate-ownership-partners? Recite after me, children, Nixon's Law: It ain't the crime, it's the coverup:

Earlier this month, the newspapers revealed that Wooldridge and Griles were partners with a ConocoPhillips vice president and senior lobbyist, Donald R. Duncan, in the purchase of a $980,000 beach house on Kiawah Island, S.C.

Nine months before the April 2006 purchase, Wooldridge had signed a consent decree giving the oil company more time to install pollution control devices at its refineries. But the Justice Department said Duncan had not been involved in the consent decree, and that Wooldridge had done nothing in the ConocoPhillips matter except to sign, as the division head, an agreement negotiated by others with the approval of the Environmental Protection Agency.

Additionally, Wooldridge had run the beach house deal through the Justice Department's ethics officer, and it had been cleared.

"Sue Ellen went through the proper channels in seeking advice from career ethics staff regarding the purchase of the property," according to a department memo. "They informed her that the purchase did not raise ethical issues."

That explanation, however, has only added to the questions Democrats are raising about Wooldridge. Conyers and Emanuel said in their letter to Gonzales that they not only have questions about "potential unethical, if not illegal, conduct" by Wooldridge but "even more disturbing, apparent complicity in such behavior by the department."

We are shocked, shocked, to find people in the Justice Department are unable to see the dead mackerel of unethical behavior when slapped in the face with it. Shocked, I tell you.