The day unfolded with various B.C. Liberals maintaining they had never, perish the thought, tried to reap political gain from distributing child booster seats to needy families.

Attorney-General Wally Oppal mounted one of the strongest denials, insisting that he'd had never gone near the seats, much less handed them out for the sake of a photo op.

Reporters were somewhat taken aback at this denial.

Oppal's own website displays a picture of the B.C. Liberal MLA presenting a booster seat to South Vancouver Family Place, an organization in his riding.

The accompanying press release had Oppal delivering 20 of the seats in all, along with a suitably inspirational quote….

This constituted fairly persuasive evidence that the attorney-general was as involved as any Liberal in the partisan distribution network.

"You're kidding," the affable Oppal replied when reporters brought up the matter of the photographic evidence.

No, we were not kidding. And his image had not been Photo-shopped into the press release along with a bogus quote.

The A-G nevertheless said he couldn't recall a thing about his role in the affair that wags have playfully dubbed "booster-seat-gate."

Date of the event he couldn't recall: Sept. 13, a little over a month ago.

Premier Gordon Campbell was reportedly off sick Wednesday. But his website continued to display a picture of him delivering booster seats to Westside Family Place on Oct. 5.

However, careful inspection disclosed that the photo was shifted from its place of prominence on the premier's site after the story broke.

Then there was the government member in charge of this masterful screw-up, Linda Reid, minister of state for child care…..

Too late, minister. Barn door wide open. Horse gone beyond any plausible hope of recovery.

But she wasn't done making things worse for herself.

She accused the Opposition New Democratic Party MLAs of "hypocrisy" because they were asking to take part in the distribution of the seats when they had "voted against the funding" for the program.

They had? No New Democrat could recall having cast such a vote in the legislature.

Reid said it happened when the NDP opposed this year's provincial budget, meaning the government's entire $36-billion-plus spending plan.

Opposition leader Carole James rightly replied that there was no line item in the budget saying "2,000 child booster seats for distribution through B.C. Liberal constituency offices."

Outside the house, Reid insisted that the program was defensible because "53 per cent of the seats" were being distributed to NDP ridings.

"Yes, but 100 per cent of the photo ops were with B.C. Liberals," returned Les Leyne, columnist for the Victoria Times Colonist….

More photo ops, Reid promised. She actually sounded keen to get on with it.

But after this week's wave of bad publicity, I have to think only the dimmest Liberal would want to be photographed in close proximity to a booster seat. They'll be handing out those seats in back alleys in the dead of night from now on….

Let's recap, shall we: Well-intentioned program tainted by cheap partisan politics. Minister a laughingstock. Colleagues running for cover.

That is some list of achievements. But you do have to give credit for one more thing.

Usually governments have to spend tens of millions of dollars or more to make themselves look this foolish.

The Liberals managed to accomplish it here for a mere $40,000, the tab of those seats, a cost-effective fiasco if ever there was one.