The greatest tragedy of Dyson Heydon's breathtaking political blunder is that it gives the labour movement an excuse to avoid reforming some of its most corrupt practices.
Yes, setting up the Royal Commission into Trade Union Governance and Corruption in March, 2014, was a blatantly political exercise by Tony Abbott.
But in spite of these unpromising beginnings, Heydon's inquiry was in the midst of turning over a rock on practices that genuinely need public exposure. The chief victims of those practices are ordinary union members who have had their money stolen by corrupt or politically ambitious union officials, and small business people who have been stood over by bikies and thugs in union-issue overalls.
Those victims, some of whom were brave enough to blow the whistle, at the risk of their livelihoods and, in some cases, their safety, will today be the ones who are feeling angriest and most betrayed by Heydon over his unfathomable failure of judgment.
Fairfax Media's investigative team has been searching out corruption and mismanagement inside Australia's unions for several years.
In January, 2014, we revealed that the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union was controlling access to building sites and industrial agreements, and its organisers were demanding that companies pay to play, sometimes using threats. We uncovered connections between unionists and bikies and organised crime figures. That reporting caused the resignation or sacking of a number union officials.
Just days later, the Abbott government announced the royal commission. Its super-judicial powers have unearthed documentary and other evidence suggesting each of these allegations is true.
Just last month, police hovered outside a hearing of the commission in Canberra and arrested former CFMEU organiser Halafihi "Fihi" Kivalu after he had admitted on the stand to accepting tens of thousands of dollars in payments from tradesmen to help them win work.
The other aspect of union misbehaviour first started emerging in 2012, when we revealed the use and misuse of slush funds, including the Australian Workers' Union's Industry 2020. The money raised, mostly by payments from employers was being used to fund factional warfare, takeovers of other unions and to buy political power.
The royal commission, using powers unavailable to others, also uncovered former AWU secretary Cesar Melhem's personal expenditure of slush fund money. These revelations forced him to stand down down as the whip of the Victorian upper house.
Fairfax found compelling evidence, augmented by the inquiries of the royal commission, into issues now under active police investigation, including that former union whistleblower Kathy Jackson put $250,000 from a payment from the Peter MacCallum Cancer institute into a union slush fund, and withdrew tens of thousands of that for her own spending.
Bill Shorten, and his actions as union leader (which included negotiating big payments from employers as industrial deals were being cut) more recently came under question. Companies such as Thiess, Cleanevent and Winslow were identified as having paid money to the union, and he was questioned over a direct donation from another company, Unibilt, to his 2007 election campaign.
It would be galling to Abbott that this does not appear to have damaged Shorten politically as much as he had hoped. But it has given the rest of us unprecedented insights into how some corners of the Australian union movement really work - the compromises we can guess are made in return for those employer payments; how those millions of dollars sloshes secretly around inside unions, undeclared to their own members. Some of this money, it seems, is corruptly misused.
Now, though, much of what we have learned that is valuable will come under question by Labor and the unions, and will be seen as tainted. The pressure on them to change their practices will ease.
Had it not been so politically motivated to start with, and under such a compromised leader, this royal commission could even have grown from its roots into a much wider inquiry with more lasting value - it could, perhaps, have looked into the sources of money pumped into both parties through Australia's secretive political donations system.
If all Dyson Heydon's findings are destined to be discredited and ignored, it is a particularly piquant irony that the killer blow was a Liberal political fundraiser.
