In case you forgot that we have a zombie state, the government has given us two timely, gentle reminders.

An authoritative investigation has found torture was practised in our prison, violating our constitution. But the prisons minister will not resign, nor will the former prison director be sacked from his current post as state envoy. Evidently, Alex Dalli represents the state well.

Moreover, it seems the state is incapable of destroying a drug haul. Nor are our armed forces capable of guarding it. Our state goes through the motions but has vacant eyes. The police arrests do not erase the scandal of the heist.

This week we discovered, thanks to Jason Micallef, that a zombie state also needs a zombie creed – beliefs that keep stumbling out of the grave, even after a public inquiry thought it had killed them off definitively.

On behalf of the state, Robert Abela accepted the findings of the Daphne Caruana Galizia public inquiry. But not, it seems, on behalf of the Labour Party.

Micallef is Labour’s special delegate for the implementation of the electoral manifesto, which is full of fine words about good governance. But, in a debate with Jason Azzopardi, organised by this newspaper, Micallef showed that some core beliefs, which the inquiry thought it had buried, still stalk the land, a threat to good governance.

The statement that attracted attention was Micallef’s offer of a Labour apology if, simultaneously, the Caruana Galizia family apologise for their mother’s sins. Nothing short of this, he said, would bring about national reconciliation.

You may have heard of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. That’s so old hat. Please enter the world of best in Europe, where Labour offers barter and reconciliation.

There’s so much that’s wrong here – false equivalence, moral cowardice and lack of accountability – that it needs to be unpacked.

First, moral equivalence. The public inquiry rejected claims that the hounding of Daphne, by Labour and state media, was simply a proportionate response to her harsh criticism – “an equal and opposite reaction”.

The inquiry had to insist on what goes without saying in an open democracy. There is nothing equal between a lone journalist targeting opponents and the media of a political party and the state’s communications aides targeting her.

Four years later, Micallef is insisting on the equivalence. Why else would he harp on how Daphne gossiped, and hurt feelings, and celebrated Dom Mintoff’s death?

He is saying that Labour targeting her – with gossip, mockery, stalking and billboards – was just tit for tat.

It was not. Daphne hurt people’s feelings; Labour put her in harm’s way. One of the first things Joseph Muscat did, upon winning the 2013 election, was to check with the police commissioner to make sure Daphne’s house was protected. He knew that Labour’s rhetoric could endanger her.  Here’s another way to put it. Was it deplorable for Daphne to celebrate Mintoff’s death? Yes. But it’s par for the course in an open democracy.

What is not normal but deviant – because it imperils democracy – is to have the machines of a political party and state focused on attacking a journalist- Ranier Fsadni

It’s not unusual for contrarian journalists to celebrate the death of politicians whose guts they hated. Margaret Thatcher, Ted Kennedy, Jerry Falwell (a US leader of the Christian right) and David Koch (an arch-conservative US financier) have all had their deaths celebrated by loud-mouthed public figures with a prominent platform.

You could call it normal – in a market with a place for journalists whose brand is controversy. It’s offensive but does not endanger democracy.

What is not normal but deviant – because it imperils democracy – is to have the machines of a political party and state focused on attacking a journalist. As the inquiry found, other journalists were targeted too. But Daphne was the one who was made an example of to scare the rest.

This brings us to the moral cowardice of Micallef’s position. Why ask the family of a dead journalist to apologise on her behalf? The zombie belief must be that the family, too, is an enemy of the state. Otherwise, an apology by them wouldn’t be meaningful.

But it was Labour media that projected the family as an enemy. And it was the state social media that pushed stories suggesting Daphne’s sons were hiding something.

Since then, we know the sons had good reason to be very careful who to give their mother’s laptop to. The most senior police officers were sabotaging the investigation.

Here’s the moral cowardice. If you admit you have something to apologise for, you don’t impose conditions. But it’s impossible for Labour to apologise properly without admitting what it did wrong: break the norms of Western democracy.

Yet, if it does that, it would have to apologise to its own loyal supporters. It has lied to them, all these years, that what it did was justifiable as tit for tat.

So Micallef has to treat the main victims of the assassination, the family, as, somehow, guilty.

There was, of course, another widely recognised victim of the assassination: Maltese democracy. In the immediate aftermath, in facing the press, Muscat recognised the murder was an attack on Malta itself.

Since then, there’s been back-pedalling. Because if – as the public inquiry concluded – Labour and the state put a journalist in harm’s way, then they were also politically responsible for this attack on Malta.

Micallef cannot admit this because, here, he can’t possibly demand that Malta, in turn, apologise simultaneously to Labour.

Or can he? I really mustn’t give him ideas. They’ll be so difficult to kill off.