Peter Kelly has become the journalistic gift that keeps on giving, our local, 21st century version of those famous “Franco-is-still-dead” Saturday Night Live sketches from the mid-1970s.

Breaking News just in. Peter Kelly is still the mayor.

And will be for at least another year. If not for life. And perhaps after death…

So is it time—as the mayor’s defenders (and there are, inexplicably, still too many of them) would argue—to get over it? Or is it past time, as the columnist spinners, Facebook fulminators, talk-show talkers and letters-to-the-editor writers insist, to get on with getting him gone?

None of this would likely even be a matter for discussion today if the mayor—when the news broke in February he was up to his eyeballs in a City Charter-violating decision to secretly front cash to a concert promoter whose shows were so singularly unsuccessful he couldn’t pay it back—had acknowledged his wrongdoing and apologized.

Peter Kelly

I blew it. I got so caught up in competing with Moncton for big concerts I went too far. I was sure the concerts would be a success, the advances would be paid back and we would all benefit. But I violated the Charter and kept council in the dark. I was wrong. I’ve learned my lesson. I apologize.

Genuine mayoral apologies being as common as common sense at a city council meeting, of course, that didn’t happen.

And Concertgate has assumed a larger-than life of its own, puffed up beyond bursting after each new mealy-mouthed, weasel-worded non-apology from the mayor.

In the last week alone, Kelly has faced—and faced down: the embarrassing council vote on calling in the cops to investigate his actions; the spectacle of an ex-cop personally filing a criminal complaint against him; the slap-in-the-face of a retired provincial auditor-general publicly asking him to resign; the salt-in-the-wound declaration by the I-don’t-owe-the-city-a-penny concert promoter that the mayor was a “professional;” and, of course, the modern ignominy of a “Peter Kelly—Resign Now” Facebook group.

This still in… Peter Kelly is still the mayor.

The real joke will be if we have to keep saying that after the October 2012 mayoral election.

It just won’t be funny.