This was the day by which Idaho Senator Larry Craig said he intended to resign. There’s been, of course, no such yet. As of midnight tonight, we’re officially off into uncharted territory. Will Craig stay another day or into early 2009? No one knows, maybe not even Craig himself.

The Washington Post is reporting today that Craig’s fellow Republican caucus members, having failed to ease him out by suasion, are plotting tougher measures:

“Worried that the disgraced lawmaker intends to remain in the Senate indefinitely, they are threatening to notch up the public humiliation by seeking an open ethics hearing on the restroom scandal that enveloped Craig last month. The Senate hearing would examine the original charges in Craig’s case, including the allegation of ‘interference with privacy,’ for peeping into the bathroom stall occupied by an undercover police officer. One senior Republican aide imagined ‘witnesses, documents, all in front of the klieg lights.’ The committee also could look for ‘a pattern of conduct’ – which means combing court records in other locales to discover whether Craig had prior arrests that haven’t come to light.”

Maybe they will. Or this could be more bark than bite, because the klieg lights might shine uncomfortably. The national political effect of the Craig story has hurt Republicans; now that the intensity of the story is easing back, would they really be wise to stoke it up again? The facts of the Craig story are already pretty much out there, and would only be reiterated. (Unless there are more legal cases buried elsewhere around the country; though we tend to doubt that, since odds are they would have surfaced in the last month-plus of intense scrutiny.)

The other possibility, if they landed really hard pressure on Craig, might be an explosion from the Idaho senator. Craig has, after all, 17 years in the heart of the Senate, and there’s probably not a lot about the dark underside of the membership he doesn’t know. The caucus might be wise to re-think the rough stuff; they may not know exactly what kind of explosive they’re dealing with.