Richard Worth has caused a heap of trouble for the Government, the National Party and himself.
Whatever happens, and whether or not the police lay charges, his political career is over.
Prime Minister John Key has said he will never be a minister again. He gave Worth two weeks leave from Parliament and suggested he should consider his future -- an invitation to resign his seat.
Worth has responded only once since his resignation. He issued a statement, through a public relations agency: "I maintain that I am innocent of any crime, and I will defend myself vigorously against any accusations that I have broken the law."
Those weren't the words of an MP considering resigning from Parliament.
It may be that Worth is right, that he hasn't broken the law and is innocent of any crime.
If he was a private individual, and it sometimes seems he is behaving as though he is, then proof of innocence might well be enough to clear his name.
But he is an MP, an elected representative, and the bar is much higher. Like all the other 121 MPs, he carries the title Honourable Member and he has to live up to it -- particularly when it comes to matters of morality.
The web around him is a tangled one. It is easy to confuse the complaints against him.
The first involves an Indian woman who is a member of the Labour Party. She says that between November and February he sent her dozens of text messages and made numerous phone calls, some of them vulgar and sexually explicit.
She says he offered her jobs in his ministerial capacity and she was very uncomfortable with the situation. She went to Labour leader Phil Goff with her problem and he raised it with Prime Minister John Key early last month.
The second involves a Korean woman who laid a complaint with police. She is reported to have said Worth invited her to a function in Wellington, arranged hotel accommodation and accompanied her to the room where "a sexual encounter" took place.
The woman presumably has a problem with the way the "sexual encounter" took place, although she had breakfast with Worth in the hotel the next morning.
It was reported on Saturday that several years ago she went to Korean media in Auckland with a complaint of inappropriate behaviour against a leading member of the Korean community. He says her accusations were entirely unfounded.
As her complaint against Worth is in the hands of the police, very little is being said about it. Key won't comment, because he can't, the woman is said to be "too distressed" to talk about it and Worth isn't forthcoming except to say he hasn't broken any law.
The first case, however, doesn't involve a complaint laid with the police and it is fair game for the opposition and the media.
Let's face it, making unwanted advances to a member of the Labour Party, and that is what Worth appears to have done, was unbelievably stupid.
It has led to a situation in which Goff is calling the shots and trying to dictate the prime minister's actions.
Goff says Key must meet the woman to verify her credibility for himself, something Key unwisely said he would do but then realised it would be inappropriate and now wants his chief of staff, Wayne Eagleson, to first establish that she has the evidence she claims to have about the text messages.
Worth was asked about these allegations when Goff raised them with Key and emphatically denied them. Key took him at his word.
Now Key, in his own words, is "piggy in the middle" and can't do anything without proof that the text messages exist and that Worth misled him.
If it turns out that Worth did mislead him, then the MP will almost certainly be expelled from National's caucus.
He might be anyway because the party needs to shut this down and get as much space as possible between itself and its erstwhile minister.
That would leave Worth still in Parliament but as an independent, a circumstance so humiliating it would most likely lead to his resignation.
The prime minister has behaved appropriately, if somewhat untidily, throughout this miserable episode.
He can't convict and execute Worth by way of a caucus expulsion without proof of the complaints against him, and as the woman involved doesn't want to accept anything other than a personal encounter, the proof can't be tested.
Goff has also behaved appropriately. He didn't go public with the woman's complaint until Key mentioned it in Parliament.
When it did enter the public arena, he tried to broker a meeting between the woman and Key, which so far hasn't been successful.
Goff would have been well aware that such a meeting would have been inappropriate for any prime minister, but he is able to fall back on Key's initial agreement to hold it.
Now he is able to accuse Key of reneging on a promise.
Key must be furious about what has happened. He hates distractions, and this is a huge distraction. He wouldn't have a bar of Winston Peters because he was "a walking soap opera" whose antics interfered with running a government.
So he made sure he didn't get Winston. Now he has a competent alternative called Richard.
