They do so quite frequently, if we are to judge by the swooning smoke signals Yorgen Fenech sent Rosianne Cutajar from his gruelling drug rehabilitation programme in Arizona.

One thing I found remarkable – well, one of several things – was how Fenech described the severely regimental discipline on the rehab boot camp. He had to make his bed, he complained, which must have been a novel experience for his mouth, stuffed with the most proletarian silver spoon, and his buttocks, reddened by an iron horseshoe.

Considering how often his mind wandered to the memo­ry of Cutajar’s thighs which, I kid you not, he compared unfavourably with pastizzi tax-xema ta’ Cordina, most people would have had good reason to refuse to change his sheets.

Urged on by the pathetic counteraccusation of miso­gyny, some people said they were made to feel uncomfortable by this grotesque invasion of privacy; that it shouldn’t be anybody’s business how unequal are Yorgen Fenech’s biceps, especially since his claim of equine prowess was made to his ex-girlfriend, not to the city and the world.

I think some people are addicted to missing the wood, if you will excuse the pun.

Imagine coming back to your home after your holiday only to find your safe knocked open and your jewellery gone. Before calling the police to report the robbery you must visit the bathroom because the journey home was longer than your bladder could autonomously sustain. In the bathroom you find a strange burly man, some of your jewellery spewing out of his stuffed pockets, and the trousers around his ankles while he relieves himself.

What are you thinking about now? That it was rude of this guy to break into your house and steal your jewellery or that it was rude of you not to knock before stepping into your own blasted bathroom?

I find it incredible even now that, for more than 10 years, people justified or excused as unintended and immaterial errors, the Panama  Papers scandals, the hospitals privatisation, the army of barely-competent partisan apparatchiks appointed to jobs with complexities well beyond their comprehension, grotesque over-spending, the licensing of the Pilatus criminal enterprise, industrial-scale public-sector recruitment of cronies, passports sold to world-class money-launderers and sanctions dodgers, an energy contract erected on bribes, a windfarm that allegedly blew millions in Fenech’s pockets, serial prosecutorial failures and on and on and on.

I find it incredible that six years later there are still people who explain away the killing of Daphne Caruana Galizia as a bolt out of the blue, a freakish exceptional flood, raining from an unclouded sky.

They could do this because whenever the conversation gets anywhere close to the problem, it swiftly pivots onto some other irrelevant topic.

I bet the reference to masturbation in the headline attracted your attention perhaps more than if yet another one of my articles was headlined with another varia­tion on the theme of corruption.

I find it incredible that six years later there are still people who explain away the killing of Daphne Caruana Galizia as a bolt out of the blue- Manuel Delia

That’s how the criminals want it. They’d rather you think of them bent double in a bed they made in a drug rehab facility in Arizona that charges per night more than you spend in a month, than think of them bribing, bullying and fornicating their way to power and wealth.

Having said that, a long-standing sexual affair bet­ween a government minister and a business owner negotia­ting public procurement contracts and complex deve­lopment permits is not a private matter.

If one was nowhere near the assassination of a journalist or even the ownership of the politician-bribing slush fund at 17 Black, an affair like that is not tabloidey gossip. It is a political scandal, the discovery of which should have material consequences.

Frankly, though, the sex was the least interesting thing in those exchanges, relevant merely to the point that Cutajar’s protestations that any suggestion that she had been intimate with Fenech were lies, were lies.

Cutajar’s disarmingly explicit declaration that she would console herself for missing a top cabinet post by giving herself a public sector job, that she manifestly knew it was wrong and she had nothing to offer the position except for a claim to an unearned salary, and that any qualms were quietened by the fact that “everyone pigs out” will go down in legend and will be told decades from now as one of the stories that best represents this last decade of greed and squalor.

“Everyone pigs out” is about as indecent a series of words as the heading of this article.

Everyone? I don’t. And it is statistically likely that you, the reader, don’t either. It would not occur to us to collect a salary for a job we do not do, even if we had the power to do so. We would never justify such blatant fraud with the fact that “everyone” else does it.

Quite the contrary. We have made it our life’s work to denounce just that sort of fraud. Quite apart from not stealing money to appease our greed, if we knew others – everyone – was doing it, we’d blow the whistle and to hell with the consequences that follow denouncing it.

When the story of Cutajar’s remote pillow talk testifying to “everyone pigging out” is told, there will be an epilogue after the punchline. Robert Abela will come in at this point of the story and bards will tell of how he defended Cutajar after her “everyone pigs out” statement came to be widely known and said her place was in public life, next to him in the gym, behind him in parliament, under him in government.

You’d have to wonder what Fenech is up to right now while he reads this.