Peter Kelly has become the journalistic gift that keeps on giving, our local 21st-century version of those famous “Generalissimo Francisco 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 March that 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.

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, 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, 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.