Let’s take a look at the Gang of Four’s scorecard from last evening’s opening reception at the YMCA.

(If you’re a friend of The King, you may wish to turn to the funny pages.)

Wait a minute … on second thought, the former councilman is the funny pages, though only if unintentional bathos counts as humor. It certainly worked for George W. Bush.

The YMCA's coming, and the Gang of Four should be denied invitations to the party.

The senior editor of NAC says: "It took almost three years before that to convince the Gang of Four to endorse the check handed to the city by Caesar's (now Horseshoe) Foundation!"

I wonder if the Schmidts, arch-opponents of Scribner Place, will be there Thursday for the donor reception? King Larry? The Conjoined Councilmen (Coffey and Price)?

The Tribune should commission McGloshen to take their pictures if any of them dare to attend. Wretched councilmen are a New Albanian birthwrong, but bad actors?

Councilmen Dan Coffey and Steve Price didn’t crash the gate. Give Coffey full credit for avoiding flagrant hypocrisy, but Price is penalized for insisting in a Tribune story yesterday that he was never opposed to the YMCA:

“A lot of people said I was anti-YMCA, which was never the case.”

Price may not know the meaning of “revisionism” and “semantics,” but he knows how to indulge in verbal games featuring them. Deeds, not words, are the determining factor. Price wasn’t "anti-YMCA", mind you. He just objected to every conceivable funding mechanism to make the Y a reality, all in the name of a benumbed cultural purity that might be summarized as, “New Albany for the dunderheaded, now and always.”

Meanwhile, former council ward heeler Slippery Larry Kochert breezed into the reception just after the doors opened and immediately thanked NA Confidential’s senior editor for the impetus to attend. It turns out that The King reads, after all, even if it always seemed like his primal reaction to books would be to search frantically for a blazing fireplace.

Predictably, not unlike a knee-panted, snot-clogged child on the playground, Larry Kochert simply couldn’t resist stepping across the chalk line after being told that by doing so, he would emerge as a buffoon, and so there he was, giggling at his perceived rambunctiousness, approaching me not once, not twice, but three times to toss adolescent jibes – and in the process, well, emerging as a buffoon, and in the process proving the veracity of everything written about him in this space since we had the temerity to begin chronicling Kochert’s abject political futility at the dawn of his mercifully final term in orifice.

All this from a fellow who’s pushing seventy, and yet as undignified and hypocritical as Kochert can be on occasions like the Y’s party, one is obliged to concede his remarkable consistency in maintaining a certain impotence of accomplishment at all times and all places. Whether formerly seated in the council’s president chair unlashing venom against imagined county enemies or supporting the Republican candidate for his seat against a fellow Democrat, Kochert surely never relinquishes his persona as living, breathing personification of everything wrong with local politics.

In fact, coming to the Y to absorb even a slight measure of credit for something he played absolutely no part in achieving comes perilously close to summarizing Kochert’s ineffectual, self-aggrandizing “career” in local affairs. The senior editor is open to correction, but other than graciously offering to hold elections in his own garage, thus giving an appropriate banana republic sheen to the process, did Kochert ever accomplish anything of lasting merit during his multiple terms in office beyond articulating the unprincipled pique of same-aged know-nothings who got just enough of theirs to cease giving a damn whether anyone else might ever have the chance to get some of theirs?

Former councilman Bill Schmidt was there last night, too, and on the second of Kochert’s stroll-by tauntings, The King brought Schmidt along for the ride, perhaps in observance of the timeless dictum of, “Double your hypocrisy, double your fun.”

The latter smiled weakly and seemed confused by the charade. You’d think that would be enough to embarrass Kochert, but it wasn’t.

That’s the final nail in the Gang of Four’s pettiness-riddled coffin, don’t you think?