At this late date, there's not much point in piling another brick of scorn on Steve Halpin, Mesquite High School's one-time title-winning super coach.

His self-confessed gambling jones has cost him nearly all he had: a coveted job as one of the best-paid high school football coaches in Texas; former friends who now avoid him; the presidency of the Texas High School Coaches Association, which he resigned in disgrace; his teaching certification, withdrawn by the state.

It has cost him his wife, who is divorcing him and wants to know what happened to more than a quarter of a million dollars the couple was saving for retirement.

And it could cost his freedom, which is in some doubt now that he has been indicted on a felony charge related to hocking more than $100,000 worth of school-owned valuables, apparently to feed his voracious and destructive habit.

Halpin, who is now reported to be eking out a living as a house painter, surely knows he screwed up.

The same cannot with certainty be said about his former bosses at the Mesquite Independent School District, who seem to have been oblivious to the notion of public accountability throughout this drawn-out saga.

For more than a year, there seems to have been an odd disconnect between sad reality and official response to this painful story.

When Mesquite police told district officials last year that their popular, affable football coach was pawning school-owned electronics and sporting goods, they told the cops to shut down the investigation. He gave it all back, they said. We've got it under control. We don't need your help.

When Dallas Morning News reporters got wind of this and contacted district authorities, the response was dismissive: We don't know what you're talking about.

Instead of reporting the allegations to the Texas Education Agency, which the law says must be done within seven days, authorities quietly announced Halpin's retirement in an abrupt, purposely misleading press release that cited "health reasons."

And when Halpin started hunting around for a new job, Mesquite officials remained resolutely silent. Letting some other hapless district unknowingly hire a guy known to boost and hock school property was evidently a lesser evil than an embarrassing headline.

It was our reporters who had to clue in the Longview Independent School District, which was talking to Halpin about a new job, about the real reason for his resignation.

"God almighty, are you serious?" gasped the Longview athletic director when contacted by The News.

It wasn't until reporters began filing open-records requests that the Mesquite district finally alerted the TEA to the case – a month after the expiration of the seven-day disclosure period that the state agency requires.

"We reported it in what we thought was a timely manner," was all MISD Superintendent Linda Henrie had to say. The school board has backed her up, not elaborating on whether Mesquite lingers in some kind of unstable time sector where "seven days" and "six weeks" are about the same thing.

Even now, with news of a felony indictment, district officials seem strangely distanced, saying in a terse, official statement that they're "surprised by the severity of the charge" filed again Halpin.

Surprised? They've known about all this for a year. If they didn't know that the value of the stuff pawned exceeded $100,000, they should have – when they called the police off the case last spring, they said they'd investigate internally. (It's still unclear how much of the merchandise was returned to the school; some of it, almost certainly, remains missing.)

Throughout the months it has taken to piece together this miserable tale, school district officials have obfuscated and stonewalled, always waiting to take action until somebody else disclosed what they had known all along.

Why?

I have no idea. Maybe it was some misplaced sense of compassion for a popular coach who had won them a state title.

But maybe it was an arrogant, we're-the-boss sense that this was private business and nobody else's – their employee, their missing stuff – as if they weren't a government agency at all, as if taxpayers didn't pony up for all those oddly disappearing laptops and camcorders.

Maybe it was an attitude that if pesky reporters would just confine their coverage to sunny features about "striving for excellence" and "reaching for the stars," disagreeable problems would just resolve themselves.

"[T]his indictment represents some closure to a situation that is disappointing and upsetting for the district," the district's recent statement says.

Closure, understand? – they seemed to say. We're upset, so stop bothering us.

I have little doubt that Steve Halpin is paying dearly for his mistakes.

As for his former employers, though, I'm not so sure.