It seems that Ms Sai Mizzi Lang is guilty of disingenuousness of cosmically culpable proportions, rendering her hardly fit for purpose in a diplomatic role. She whined, while sticking up for her poor little self, that she doesn't earn €13,000 a month.
The Government, on the other hand, has had to tell us that over the three years she will be giving service to the State - hopefully, sterling and to this one - she will be costing the public purse close on €480,000.
Pressing this button and that on my iPhone gets me to the figure of €13,000 per month.
This tidy sum will not be paid over to Ms ML in folding notes every last Friday of the month or anything as crass as that, of course. She will be getting her salary and then have various bits and bobs paid for her, rendering the arrangement as efficient, in all senses, as possible.
The poor dear, apparently so sensitive a soul that public inquiry into the cost of her to you and me that she was moved to sniffles (one wonders as to the extent to which such a thin skin makes her an asset to our diplomatic corps) had tried to give us all the impression that her remuneration was only something on the lines of €3,300 per month.
She reckoned without that awkward, perhaps alien to her culture of origin, requirment for disclosure to be full and frank.
The Government, on the other hand, presumably knowing full well that it would be caught with its collective trousers around its ankles if it tried to pull a fast one, had to give us the Full Monty, meaning that La Sai Mizzi's full price had to be exposed.
What price her tears now, ay?
The thing is, of course, that in truth, what Ms Sai Mizzi costs you and me is hardly the point. Even less to the point is what Ambassadors Cassar and Xuereb cost us, although for some strange reason the Government thought it was germane to the issue.
Just incidentally, Xuereb and Cassar were Ambassadors, while Mizzi Lang is not, or more precisely, she was not one until the point in time when it became convenient to classify her within the ranks of the most senior of those "honest gentlemen sent to lie abroad for the good of their country" (Henry Wooton, Augsberg, 1604, I hasten to add).
Xuereb and Cassar were not, sadly for Ms Mizzi Lang's case, the spouses of a Super Minister. They were not appointed to their posts in circumstances shrouded in mystery and low light because of that, unlike Mizzi Lang, the details of whose appointment had to be extracted out of her husband's boss something on the lines of getting blood out of a particularly obdurate stone.
That is why Sai Lang Mizzi being sent to lie abroad in our interests is a scandal, not because - or rather, not only because - she's costing a considerable number of €uro to do it, but because she is who she is and her appointment was murky in the extreme.
No amount of full and unavoidably frank disclosure at this late juncture, with the added distraction of a meaningless Memorandum of Understanding (show us the meat, not the packaging) to take the media's eye off the ball, will change this.