I returned home from a week's vacation to a stack of newspapers, one of which had a front-page photo of former Pennsylvania Democrat House Whip Mike Veon in handcuffs.

Gee, what a surprise.

Our statehouse turns out felons with regularity, and this is no conviction, but there was nonetheless a singular predictability about the photo of the defiant pol from Beaver Falls in shackles.

Veon was the guy who helped engineer the unconstitutional midsummer pay grab of 2005, and then was the only one of 253 lawmakers in America's Largest Full-Time State Legislature to vote against repealing it. His constituents didn't go for his arrogant consistency, and went out of their way to punish him in November 2006, splitting their ballots to vote him out the same day they voted overwhelmingly to bounce Republicans Rick Santorum and Melissa Hart from Congress.

So now Veon is among 12 people charged with various charges of theft, deception and conspiracy in what has come to be called "Bonusgate.'' Grand jurors say Veon and his staff members paid more than a million dollars in your tax money to employees doing political work (and not even doing it well, given Veon's defeat.)

All this thievery is alleged to have taken place after and during the pay-grab backlash. If true, even the shamelessly lawless middle-of-the-night pay grab would look like a profile in courage by comparison. The political fallout also illustrates just how insulated from reality Harrisburg Democrats have been -- and remain.

Veon's arrest, an event as easy to predict as a geyser at Yellowstone, has led a few scattered House Democrats to raise their voices for Rep. Bill DeWeese to step down as majority leader. But he ain't quitting. Brett Favre will retire before Bill DeWeese does.

DeWeese, 58, of Greene County, has been a member of the House since 1976 and the Democratic leader since 1993. He has loyal friends in the statehouse despite his esrstwhile right-hand man, Veon, going down hard. It's telling that his Democratic colleagues returned DeWeese to party leadership two years ago by an overwhelming margin despite his near defeat by the voters.

DeWeese barely won re-election in 2006. He lost his home county but hung on via winning margins in the slices of his district in Washington and Fayette counties.

Such a precarious hold is meaningless to old Democratic hands like Rep. Mark Cohen of Philadelphia, the House Democratic Caucus chairman. Last week, Cohen sent a memo to all caucus members urging them to stay the course with DeWeese at the helm:

"The last time a Democratic leader was forced to resign in mid-term, in 1977, the Democrats became embroiled in factionalism for the rest of the session,'' Cohen wrote. "The Democrats lost 18 seats in the 1978 general election despite passage [sic] reforms including the establishment of the state ethics commission . . . Taking action that will feed the desire of our political opponents to keep 'bonusgate' in the news is counterproductive to our interests as a political party.''

Cohen noted that Democrats gained seats in Congress in 1998 after "standing tough" for President Bill Clinton in his impeachment hearings, while Republicans lost seats after Richard Nixon was forced to resign in 1974.

"Our caucus should be focusing on raising the voters' standard of living, not in forming circular firing squads,'' Cohen wrote.

So a top Democrat is arguing, in effect, that Republicans were wrong to abandon Tricky Dick. That's just beautiful.

Another caucus insider told me that "Bill [DeWeese] trusted the wrong people but the thing that's very important to remember is that these were individuals that the vast majority inside and outside the House Democratic caucus liked.''

In other words, DeWeese didn't know what was going on. I can believe that, but is that a mark of a leader? What's his slogan going to be? "You can't say this happened on my watch because I wasn't even watching"?

Greg Hopkins, the Republican challenger who narrowly lost to DeWeese in 2006, will return with more campaign ammunition this November.

Voters, of course, will be worried about much more than who represents them in Harrisburg. We'll be electing a new president and U.S. Congress. We're unlikely to see the historic turnover in the statehouse we saw in 2006, when 55 lawmakers were either defeated at the polls or retired rather than face voters' wrath.

But even if continued reform of Harrisburg is not the paramount issue this year, it ought to be out there. Pennsylvania Democrats have a little more than three months to either show they can clean up their House or face eviction. Veon's defeat in 2006 shows that Western Pennsylvanians aren't afraid to split their ballots.