It's been a year since details of $1.9 million worth of bonus pay for House Democratic staffers started trickling out, and Majority Leader Bill DeWeese has spent the past 12 months offering various and conflicting explanations that insult the intelligence of Pennsylvania residents.

First, the payments were an "internal personnel matter." Then, he said the reason he had refused to provide the information was because he mistakenly thought it already was a matter of public record. What?

Some employees got bonuses in lieu of raises, he said in February. Wait, in June he said the extra pay was used to attract and retain the best workers. He insisted the caucus has cooperated fully with a state attorney general's investigation -- this after House Democrats tried to block the grand jury's access to records seized from Democratic offices.

Just last month, after Mr. DeWeese fired seven staffers because of the results of an internal investigation he commissioned, he said: "My decisive actions thus far in these difficult months prove that I am a leader."

We're getting whiplash trying to follow the explanations.

Remember the Jon Lovitz character on "Saturday Night Live"? When confronted with new and conflicting information, he would sneer, stammer, hem and haw, then finally say, "Yeah, that's the ticket."

How can Mr. DeWeese expect the public to believe anything he says? Perhaps he's able to deny the obvious because the vast majority of House members have remained silent; a few have even come to his defense.

In the meantime, any Democratic progress agenda is being squandered. Last February Mr. DeWeese asked the readers of this newspaper, in a column he authored, to turn their attention from the bonuses to health-care reform, property-tax reductions, education and the development of alternative-energy sources. Yet those initiatives, all pushed by Gov. Ed Rendell, are in the deep freeze because the legislator who should be running the table is immersed in a bonus scandal.

We have waited too long for Bill DeWeese to step down voluntarily from his leadership role, something we said he should have done 10 months ago. It's time for the governor and those supposedly reform-minded House Democrats to force him out.