The papers are all atwitter with confirmation that the U.S. attorney is finally going ahead with an investigation into the crackpot sherrif’s office being run by Joe Arpaio. Seems like Channel 5 broke the story:

Maricopa County Manager David Smith and County Budget Director Sandi Wilson both said they had been subpoenaed to appear before a grand jury next week to testify about their interactions with the Sheriff’s Office.

As PHXated has noted before, this (inevitable) development and its probable denouement (Arpaio’s indictment on a slew of offenses) will make a lot of the timid coverage of Arpaio’s actions, particularly in the national media, seem a little embarrassing.

An interesting question will be whether the process, which could take months, will at all cow Arpaio’s behavior. ON the one hand you can bet not: his success has been built thus far on blustery denials and bullheaded actions.

Still, his professional life will be made much more difficult as his henchmen lawyer up and start to realize how legally vulnerable their crackpot leader has made them.

The Channel 5 report says specifically that the jury is targeting Arpaio’s use of his police power to retaliate against his political critics.

A wrenching sign of how strained things are at the EVT: The Tribune’s story on this key development … is an AP story.