U.S. Attorney for Alaska Karen Loeffler on Friday ended a long-running federal investigation of political corruption in Alaska in much the way President Richard M. Nixon "ended" the war in Vietnam: She declared victory, and said it's all over. What happens next, history will decide.

For now, the federal probes of Alaska politicians have stopped, and all the politicians are free. Former Rep. Tom Anderson, R-Anchorage, did his time in a federal prison. Former Rep. Bruce Weyhrauch, R-Juneau, got off on a plea deal by agreeing to a misdemeanor charge to escape federal charges. Former U.S. Sen. Ted Stevens, the biggest fish caught in the federal probe, was convicted -- only to have a judge overturn the conviction because of federal misconduct, and then he died in a 2010 airplane crash that shook the state.

And finally, on Friday, the cases of Reps. Pete Kott and Vic Kohring came to an end. Both had been in prison when evidence of prosecutorial misconduct in the Stevens case exposed some dirty dealing by the Justice Department prosecutors involved in their cases. They were freed pending new trials. Plea negotiations followed, and Kott and Kohring both eventually agreed to plead guilty to bribery charges in exchange for being given sentences equal to the time they'd already spent in jail.

Plea deals a good deal for everybody - save the Alaska public

It saved them the high costs of new trials, and it ensured they wouldn't be sent back to prison. It was, in those terms, a good deal for both men. It saved the U.S. Attorney's office from new trials, which could have proved a mess and possibly embarrassing, which was a good deal for it. The only body, it seems, still pining for closure is the public.

At a press conference following the sentencing hearings for Kott and Kohring, Loeffler declared "victory," in the "largest and most successful corruption case in Alaska history." She said the two convictions brought that investigation to a close and sent a message that "corrupt politicians and those who work to benefit from corrupt politicians will not be tolerated."

The long and tangled corruption probe began in 2003 as an investigation into private prisons and then found its way to the oil patch, centering on Bill Allen, a former migrant fruit picker who rose to become president of (now-defunct) oil services company VECO Corp. The ascension turned Allen into an Alaska political kingmaker, who in turn became the government's key witness in "Operation Polar Pen," the Federal moniker for Alaska's political corruption investigation. All told, the investigation netted 10 convictions, six of which were of public officials. The government did net convictions. However, in many ways its investigation proved as ruinous for the prosecution as to the defendants, resulting in the tarnished careers of a few FBI agents, a handful of prosecutors and the suicide of Nicholas Marsh, a Department of Justice attorney who had overseen the probe. More damaging information might come.

The investigation, which involved Kott and Kohring, began to unravel when a federal grand jury indicted one of the most powerful men in the country, the late Sen. Ted Stevens, who pleaded not guilty and chose a speedy trail. He was found guilty of accepting gifts from Allen and not reporting them, but his verdict was later overturned after it was discovered that the prosecution withheld key evidence from the defense. The federal judge in the case, U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan, said that in his 25 years on the bench, he had "never seen mishandling and misconduct like what I have seen" in this case.

Sullivan, in turn, ordered a special investigation into the investigation. That report has not yet been released. A call to the judge’s clerk as well as the attorney conducting the investigation was not returned.