It's a comfort to know that today was perhaps the very last time that any of us will have to see the self-satisfied visage of Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) leering contemptuously from the floor of the Senate. What I do not understand is why.

No one who listened carefully to Franken's remarks this morning could walk away from them with any notion of why he is bothering to resign. He stood there in his purple tie grinning smugly, explaining, as if to a sensitive child, why he had done nothing wrong.