Edmund A. Matricardi III, the former executive director of the Virginia Republican Party, was fined $5,000 and sentenced to three years probation for his role in the GOP eavesdropping scandal. But the case didn't end there.

Matricardi's Virginia law license was suspended following his guilty plea; a three-judge court later reinstated the license once his probation ends in 2005.

Testifying under oath, Matricardi told the three-judge court that then-Speaker Vance Wilkins as well as former party chairman Gary R. Thomson gave him the go-ahead to listen in on Democratic strategy sessions.

Thomson had resigned his post in August after pleading guilty to allowing Matricardi to listen to the first of two conference calls and distribute transcripts of it.

Wilkins insisted he had nothing to do with the eavesdropping; his chief aide was convicted earlier in the same case.

The Washington Post said editorially, "If orders did come down from on high in the GOP, shouldn't there be a further investigation and punishment of others who were in the scheme?"

Democrats repeatedly argued the same thing, especially after newspaper reporters from the Danville Register & Bee and the Charlottesville Daily Progress obtained cell phone records for Anne Petera, Attorney General Jerry Kilgore's administrative director.

The phone records show Matricardi made a second call to Petera on March 22, 2002, a call she had denied receiving. 

The records also show that Petera called Kilgore a day before Kilgore's chief of staff told him about the eavesdropping.

Kilgore has not released his cell phone records, saying they are not public records because the cell phone is a personal one.

"I think the attorney general ought to release the cell phone records if he's been conducting public business on it," retiring Del. Chip Woodrum said. "A public record is a public record, no matter what its source."

Predictably, Democrats began paraphrasing the familiar questions from Watergate a generation ago.

"What did Mr. Kilgore know and when did he know it in the two-and-a-half days between the time his office learned of the first illegal intercept and the time his office notified the Virginia State Police about it?" then-Party Chairman Larry Framme asked.

According to newspaper reports, lawyers from the attorney general's office joined in a public-relations strategy huddle with Matricardi, representatives of the Republican National Committee, GOP lawmakers and private redistricting attorneys three days after Kilgore's administrative chief learned about the eavesdropping. The meeting ended about an hour before Matricardi monitored a second Democratic conference call.

Del. Preston Bryant, R-Lynchburg, argued that staffers in attendance of the meeting had absolutely no idea Matricardi was suspected of any criminal wrong-doing.

Why? Because, Bryant said, Kilgore had wisely chosen not to spread that fact — or any specific details at all — around his office, for doing so could've undercut the State Police investigation he most certainly knew was coming.