For the last three years the Corporation of Hamilton’s actions have brought to mind an endlessly meandering joke in search of a punchline.

Now we’ve finally had the pay-off to the excruciatingly extended build-up and the joke, one in the worst imaginable taste, turns out to have been on us.

When the Home Affairs Minister effectively wrested control of the city’s affairs from the hapless “Team Hamilton” earlier this year, it seemed the Corporation had exhausted all of the possibilities when it came to self-defeating, self-deluding and self-destructive behaviour.

Everything which had to be seen to be disbelieved had presumably been seen, from the signing away of 20 acres of the Hamilton waterfront on a 262-year lease to an all but unknown and largely unproven developer to the legal shambles surrounding the Corporation’s parking and clamping policy.

But last week the Corporation’s Par-la-Ville car park was placed in the hands of receivers after the site was used as collateral for an $18 million loan to finance a still-born city hotel project.

And no one, with the possible exception of the forensic auditors who are presumably even now investigating the situation, has the faintest clue where the money ended up.

In the wake of this latest municipal scandal, the Home Affairs Minister — in a masterpiece of clipped understatement — cited the “significant challenges” at the Corporation which make wholesale reform of Bermuda’s local governance statutes unavoidable.

To understand why long-established laws, customs and conventions relating to transparency, accountability and even constitutionality appear to have been not so much flouted as cheerfully ignored you must first understand the nature of the current Corporation.

And that is next to impossible.

Since 2012 the current Corporation of Hamilton has had its own sets of rules, its own sets of mores, and those rules and mores are not duplicated anywhere else on the face of the planet.

To try and grasp the magnitude of the inverted logic on display is akin to falling down a rabbit hole, waking up in Wonderland and being confronted by an entirely unfamiliar form of reasoning.

Simply put, the Corporation became an unreal place full of unreal people with their own unrealistic way of viewing the world.

Before the Home Affairs Minister stepped in, the Corporation was not so much a municipal body as a form of collective neurosis.

The serial absurdities, the blatant disregard for due process and even basic common sense, the anything-goes manner which suggested cause and consequence scarcely enjoyed a nodding acquaintanceship with one another in the Corporation’s deliberations, all had reduced the business conducted at City Hall to the level of chaotic burlesque.

Unfortunately there are all manner of real world ramifications arising from the unreal situation at City Hall, some of which could have been avoided if proper oversight had been put in place months ago.

While the Home Affairs Minister finally did step in and take on temporary stewardship of the Corporation and its affairs, it was his Government which actually approved the $18 million hotel guarantee in November, 2013.

And it was following a well-trodden trail. For the previous Government had turned a wilfully blind eye to what the Home Affairs Minister describes as repeated “failures of administration that have caused disarray in governance” before being voted out of office in December, 2012.

Blame for the current shambolic situation can be apportioned across Bermuda’s political divide. But responsibility for remedying this unhappy state of affairs doesn’t lie solely within the purview of the politicians in the House of Assembly.

Hamilton voters, particularly the newly re-enfranchised business owners who lost their right to have a say in city affairs in 2012, must play a role as well.

For, ultimately, a revised and strengthened Municipalities Act will only be as good as the municipal officials who Hamilton voters elect to the Corporation.

With an election pending, it is incumbent on Hamilton’s electorate to return those candidates not only best qualified to represent their interests but best able to work with Government in repairing the damage inflicted on the credibility and finances of the Corporation in recent years.

Neither the city nor Bermuda can afford to be a victim of a costly joke like “Team Hamilton” again.