MANILA, Philippines - As Eduardo Ermita recently put it, “Everyone will have his time before the bar of public opinion and the courts of law.” Let’s call it Ermita’s Law: In other words, every dog has his day. The corollary to this is what has famously come to be known as the Salceda Theorem: If it’s a female dog, then the outcome of the dog’s day is predetermined by the bitch’s lucky star.

But I was glad to hear the folksy executive secretary echo a thought previously expressed in this corner. The bar of public opinion is where the political fitness of public officials is decided: as measured by opinion polls, as decided in elections, as fought out in our representative democracy’s impeachment process and referendums.

The court of law, on the other hand, is where graver penalties—that might deprive an official of life, liberty or property—are determined. And rightly so: because these things are rights too precious to leave to public opinion, unlike mere possession of office.

Late last month, Dionisio Santiago, head of the Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency, went to Tacloban City. His mission? To sign a Memorandum of Agreement with NGOs supportive of the PDEA’s campaign against drugs and, along the way, prove that he’s some sort of comedian.

The signing included a press conference. Santiago told reporters that the PDEA plants drugs on suspects in what was, apparently, one of the longest jokes ever made by an official.

The joke went like this. Said Santiago, “We sometimes do this [plant drugs on suspects] although this is against the rule of law. Definitely we only apply this matter to some cases, like a subject who is publicly known to be peddling drugs but always escapes arrest. This is when we enter the picture.”

“But,” he went on, “PDEA operatives make sure that they [known drug dealers] won’t know that we put planted evidence. We are doing this because we want to neutralize big personalities engaged in the illegal drug trade which destroys the future of the youth.”

And he continued, “This is a remedy that we sometimes undertake so that we can put to rest some people. Rather than killing them let’s just plant evidence so they go to jail. You know, to kill a cat there are so many ways, but we won’t make very obvious the planting.” End of joke.

Wait. Where’s the punchline, you ask?

It came a few days later, when he finally said he was kidding. “I had been there [Tacloban] for eight years,” he told the media, “[and] so when I saw and talked with long-time media friends there, I told them that we have been planting evidence just to catch and jail these drug fiends.”

“But it was only in jest,” Santiago clarified. “Besides,” he went on, “if we resort to that [planting of evidence], it will be bad for us. We will be unlucky in our operations,” he added, stating the obvious. “All we can do is smile about it and hope to do better next time,” he concluded.

Wait, again. There’s still no punchline, you ask?

Well, you have to put his humor in the context of another Santiago. Perhaps Dionisio Santiago was inspired by the example set by Miriam Defensor-Santiago—she of the wild and crazy humor that ensures she’s always good copy.

You remember when the zany senator vowed to jump off a plane and then cackled about it afterwards? That was her laughing at herself (and I guess, the press, too). Then the irrepressible Santiago (Miriam, that is) became one of the President’s favorite travel companions (every ruler must have a court jester, and besides, the Senate already has a Joker). And then she also became the President’s nominee to sit on the International Court of Justice. That’s a pretty long joke, too: on the voters, on every destination of a presidential junket and, finally, on the world and the legal profession.

While I know that if you have to explain a joke, it means that the joke fell flat, let’s try to—pardon the pun—salvage Santiago’s joke and explain what he was trying to say.

The head of PDEA tells the world that his organization plants drugs on suspects, which means every conviction can now be appealed, and says not to worry because not only do his agents believe that their opinions can trump a court of law (depriving someone of life, liberty and property because of an agent’s certainty) but that, after turning everything topsy-turvy with his Tacloban declaration, it turns out Santiago was just kidding.

The joke isn’t that the jokester of a PDEA chief was pulling the public’s leg—it’s that even if he’d been dead serious the official reaction could only be laughable.

In any other government with aspirations to upholding a genuine rule of law or simple decency, both the Cabinet member and the President would have summoned Santiago and fired him on the spot.

There was a time lag of a couple of days between Santiago’s deadpan admission and his subsequent admission that he’d told a joke with a straight face. During that interval, when most every decent Filipino who heard about the announcement was shocked and scandalized by it, the President went on with her stony-faced activities as if nothing had happened. Maybe she was busy with other things? But even her otherwise hyper-alert Secretary of Injustice didn’t turn his Partisan Squint of Doom™ on Santiago, either.

Which means that even when the public wasn’t in on the joke, the President and Raul Gonzalez had no problem with the Rule of Glo apparently having little to do with the Rule of Law. What’s a drug dealer anyway, or a communist, or anyone picked up or even rubbed out on an official’s say-so? Trust us, they’d say.

And while it leaves the rest of us laughing, who do you think gets to have the last laugh? Not those deprived of life, liberty, or property on an official’s hunch, that’s for sure.