Suffice to say that Labour is in deep crisis, the likes of which have not been seen since David Lange and Sir Roger Douglas fell out in spectacular fashion back in the 1980s and Jim Anderton jumped ship, taking a large number of the party's activists with him.
Things are not that bad - yet.
The once proud party is shell-shocked and quivering with self-doubt and hurt after shedding yet more thousands of votes in last month's general election on top of the more than 180,000 which went elsewhere in 2011.
But Labour is playing Russian roulette with itself. It needs the feud between David Cunliffe and many of his MPs like a hole in the head. But there is a mood on both sides that things must be settled one way or another before the party can begin to regroup and rebuild.
Mr Cunliffe's refusal to quit the leadership when anyone else would have done so without prompting could well be his political epitaph.
But he appears immune to persuasion to give up on securing the one prize his ambition has craved - becoming prime minister.
Failure does not enjoy a place in Mr Cunliffe's curriculum vitae. He can still foresee glory days on some distant horizon. His colleagues see six wasted years in Opposition under first Phil Goff, then David Shearer and now Mr Cunliffe, during which the party has got precisely nowhere.
What is different is that rank-and-file party members - along with trade unions affiliated to the party - have secured changes in Labour's constitution which now give them a combined 60% say in who becomes the party's leader. And more to the point, whether someone remains the leader.
Mr Cunliffe has stared down his adversaries and got what he wanted - a leadership ballot of ordinary members, the trade union affiliates and Labour's 32 MPs which was set in motion on Wednesday night by Labour's national council, the party's governing body.
Now everyone in the party is forced to take sides. There is no middle ground in this acrimonious affair. You are either for Mr Cunliffe or against him.
You either think he is deeply flawed or you think he proved in the recent election campaign he can lift himself above his blunders when it really matters.
You either believe he is the only person in the caucus with even an outside chance of carrying off what looks like an impossible victory in 2017 or you don't.
Crucially, you either believe allowing every party member a say in who leads Labour is now a right which must not be subject to tampering.
Or you believe the parliamentary wing needs protection from the wider party being fooled into making the wrong choice.
Those MPs who would prefer a Cunliffe-free caucus were prepared to tolerate him being foisted on them once. But not twice.
Labour's parliamentary wing may have lost its monopoly on choosing the leader. But that is not licence for the newly-enfranchised to ignore political reality and veto the wish of the majority of the caucus to rid themselves of a leader who has failed to deliver and who gives those MPs no confidence he will do better in 2017.
To make such a fuss about it, however, is to invite a backlash from the wider party. Those dissenting MPs have bitten their tongues in expectation that the wider party will come to its senses and rebuff Mr Cunliffe's bid to cling on.
Mr Cunliffe, though, has played his limited cards cleverly. He kept everyone on tenterhooks before finally declaring he would resign as leader, rather than lose a caucus vote of no confidence required under party rules within three months of an election.
Under Labour's revised constitution, either outcome - resignation or the loss of a caucus confidence vote - triggers a party-wide ballot. Mr Cunliffe was always going to resign the leadership. He could not afford to lose a confidence vote. That would have placed a dead albatross around his neck during the six weeks set aside for contenders for the party's top job to sell their vision of Labour revitalised to party members during a series of ''hustings meetings'' up and down the country.
Mr Cunliffe has the handicap of incumbency. If he gets defensive about his brief track record as leader, he is on the road to defeat. He has to go on the offensive, as he did this week in trying to marginalise Grant Robertson, who (so far) is the only MP challenging Mr Cunliffe's grip on the leadership.
Labour basked in the warm fuzzies generated by the Cunliffe, Robertson and Shane Jones roadshow during last year's leadership ballot. It will have been very lucky if this year's version does not turn ugly.
If Mr Robertson wins, the wider party will have to accept it. By and large they will. The party knows and trusts him. He is selling himself as a unifying force.
There is, however, a substantial number of activists who will view a Robertson victory as the result of pressure being applied on the wider party by those in the caucus who hate Mr Cunliffe.
Those activists seem less interested in power than maintaining an absolute purity of principle - something a supposedly broad church party like Labour finds near impossible even before it makes the trade-offs which are part and parcel of proportional representation.
Those activists have taken advantage of a power vacuum left by weak leadership of the party organisation. They will make life difficult for Mr Robertson.
But all that is small beer in comparison to the impact of a Cunliffe victory. It will be Groundhog Day - only much worse.
Where that would leave Mr Robertson and David Parker, deputy leader and, more pertinently, the party's finance spokesman, is anyone's guess, The pair have both said they have no confidence in Mr Cunliffe as leader.
You cannot get paper thick enough to cover such glaring cracks should Mr Cunliffe proffer the olive branch.
Alternatively, Mr Cunliffe might wield his freshly renewed mandate and engage in a caucus clean-out aided by some MPs voting with their feet and quitting Parliament.
It is easier to assess what the voting public makes of two weeks of postelection mayhem inside the major Opposition party.
Those who broke a lifetime habit of voting Labour and ticked another party will be relieved they did so. Those who stayed loyal to Labour will be asking themselves why they bothered.
• John Armstrong is The New Zealand Herald political correspondent.
