We at Various Things & Stuff will be taking Thanksgiving off to eat various things and stuffing, so you’ll be blogless for the holiday. Have a great holiday, and we’ll see you on Monday.

Just more than a week after appointed Attorney General George Chanos decided to go where no other lawman dared to go — into the middle of the city’s sweetheart deal with Bill Walters over the Royal Links golf course — he’s announced he’s going to recuse himself and hire a San Francisco-based law firm as special counsel at a cost of more than $250,000.

The reason? Chanos is part-owner of some downtown property that is being sold to a developer with high-rise ambitions, but who needs city permission to vacate a street near his project.

Thus, goes the reasoning: Chanos would be investigating the city at a time when he needs something from the city, a clear and obvious conflict.

Two immediate observations:

One, Chanos undoubtedly knew about his project when he lept with both feet into the Walters matter, in which land Walters acquired back in 1999 under some highly suspicious circumstances is now being targeted for homebuilding, in one of the sweetest of sweetheart deals. Why didn’t he disclose that conflict and get special counsel from the outset? He answers in the Review-Journal today:

“I’m only thinking in terms of being the attorney general. I’m not thinking about any of that, how it might impact me personally, how it might impact me politically,” Chanos said.

Chanos is new, so he probably doesn’t know that part of being attorney general is considering potential conflicts of interest.

Two, it’s manifest that — at least in part — Chanos’ entry into this case was political. Other law-enforcement agencies, including Clark County District Attorney David Roger and a deputy U.S. attorney had said that any alleged investigated by Metro Police were too old to prosecute. And, although the current deal with Walters was not in the best interests of taxpayers and a violation of the City Council’s fiduciary duty to Las Vegas residents, it’s not illegal. And Chanos desperately needs to raise his name recognition and profile in advance of his election next year against Democrat Catherine Cortez Masto.

But Chanos has promised an open-ended, comprehensive investigation, possibly beyond the charges that Metro originally probed, which were rejected by other agencies. And we’re glad he’s done that, because if the memos written by deputy city attorneys John Redlein and Bill Henry are accurate, crimes did take place between 1997-1999 with regard to Walters’ land. And perhaps a comprehensive inquiry can find a way to being those alleged wrongdoers to justice.

R-J columnist John L. Smith wrote today that Chanos did the right thing in recusing himself even though he was likely to be criticized for it. We couldn’t agree more; weathering the criticism is a small price to pay for an investigation with integrity, and by stepping aside, Chanos has demonstrated — regardless of the politics of the matter — that he has integrity.

With Walters employing such eagle-eyed powerhouses as attorney Richard Wright, any prosecution will have to be as close to perfect as it can possibly be. “What good are my findings if they could be undermined?” Chanos asks. It’s an excellent question, and he’s answered as best he can.

At long last, the G-sting investigation that’s seen the indictments of four now-former Clark County Commissioners has branched out to the development community.

We’ve heard rumors of the same for a long time, but on Wednesday, the feds indicted Don Davidson, a former vice president of Triple Five Nevada, and his son, Lawrence Davidson, an unethical ex-attorney currently serving federal time for forging the signature of a federal judge. More on them in a second.

At the center of the controversy: Former Clark County Commissioner Erin Kenny, who was a lot more unethical than we at Various Things & Stuff ever really thought.

We’ll confess that, before Kenny was snared by the feds, we admired her drive and passion. We disagreed with her frequently (especially on her plans to require cell phone users to use hands-free earpieces and her attempts to ban smoking in the county). But we admired her commitment to building a free-standing children’s hospital at University Medical Center, the need for which has since become manifest. She lost that fight, unfortunately.

But we had no idea at the time Kenny was taking unreported money from at least one developer to commit official acts, something to which she’s now obviously confessed. So, to the extent that we were too gullible and not suspicious enough, we take full responsibility and apologize to our readers. It’s doubtful that we could have uncovered this scandal on our own, without the resources of the FBI, but we should have looked at it much more closely than we did. We promise not to make that mistake again.

Clark County Manager Thom Reilly says it best in today’s Review-Journal. “It [the indictments] makes you question everything she’s [Kenny] done. From staff’s perspective, it makes you question all her motives on a variety of issues. You don’t know what her motives were. Is it because she really believed in something? Was it self-serving? Was it greed?”

Indeed, we’ve found ourselves mentally reviewing some of Kenny’s initiatives, looking for a bribery connection. And now, every single controversial vote at any level of government will raise the same question in the minds of the losing side: Did the commissioners who voted against me take bribes? This is especially true of neighbors who are fighting big development projects that can afford to hire top-notch attorneys to argue their cases.

This, at last, is Kenny’s legacy: Suspicion and distrust of government, the elevation of personal interests above the commonweal, and the moral degradation of public office. Prison hardly seems a sufficient punishment for the injury she’s inflicted on democracy itself.

The details in a federal indictment are fairly simple: Davidson allegedly gave Kenny $200,000 (in checks allegedly routed through his son to an LLC run by Kenny’s father) in exchange for Kenny helping to get land at Buffalo Drive and Desert Inn Road re-zoned for a CVS pharmacy. (Conversations about that money were reportedly recorded by FBI agents.)

But plenty of other questions are raised, but not answered, in the indictment. We pose them here:

1.) The indictment says Kenny’s unnamed accountant was engaged to help hide the money. Why has he or she not been indicted as part of the conspiracy, too? (Or has he or she agreed to testify about the scheme?)

2.) The indictment says Kenny and Davidson had a relationship dating to 2000, and that they met socially once per month so he could give her $3,000 from “a developer” grateful for her assistance on a controversial vote. Who was this developer?

(Is it perhaps Triple 5? In 2000, there was a controversial vote on a Spring Valley casino in Kenny’s district, for which she lobbied the commission. The casino vote went Triple 5’s way — it cost ex-Commissioner Lance Malone his seat and sent him into the willing arms of strip club mogul Mike Galardi, with felonious results. But the project was later torpedoed by the Gaming Policy Board. And don’t forget that Davidson was a vice-president of Triple 5 at the time all this occurred.)

3.) If it was Triple 5, why hasn’t anyone from that company been indicted for providing cash payments to Kenny? If it wasn’t Triple 5, why hasn’t the developer who provided those cash payments been indicted? Or is that still to come?

One irony, revealed by the R-J, that we cannot resist noting because we’re weak: Commissioner Chip Maxfield, who came to represent the Buffalo/Desert Inn parcel in a redistricting (done at Kenny’s behest to eliminate potential political opponents), suggested at the November 2001 meeting on the zone change that Kenny “…worked with developers and whatever.” Clearly, he was saying what neighbors were thinking — Kenny’s been paid off.

But Commissioner Myrna Williams rose to Kenny’s defense, saying it was a “pejorative remark.” Yes, it was, commissioner, but it was also true, if you believe the contents of the federal indictment. Looks like Williams owes Maxfield an apology.

Oh, and one final irony, that we also can’t resist: According to the R-J, the final votes for passage on the re-zoning matter were Kenny, Williams, Dario Herrera and Mary Kincaid-Chauncey.

Officials currently under federal indictment: Kenny, Herrera and Kincaid-Chauncey.

Now that’s not the kind of company Williams wants showing up on a flier in her 2006 election, especially running against a strong opponent like Assemblywoman Chris Giunchigliani.