Buried deep in this AP story about how veterans groups and even House Majority Leader Barbara Flynn Currie are upset at Gov. Blagojevich for allegedly circumventing veterans preference in state hiring and not disclosing whether veterans were passed over for connected job applicants is this nugget:

The Associated Press reported recently that Bernard Ysursa Jr., a 34-year-old Belleville resident, competed against eight other applicants for business administrator at an East St. Louis prison. Corrections officials declared him the best candidate but designated him as an intern when they put him on the payroll in April 2003, saying he needed more experience.

A document newly obtained by the AP shows that the agency decided to make the position an internship before Ysursa interviewed — not after. The “personnel action request” signed by the Corrections Department’s interim director approved creating a trainee position for the business administrator on March 26, 2003, a full week before Ysursa’s interview. […]

Hiring Ysursa as an intern meant the administration did not have to give preference to any veterans or minorities on the list of applicants.

Meanwhile, the governor has now revamped political hiring procedures for at least the third time.

Gov. Rod Blagojevich’s top attorney has ordered state agency directors to stop taking requests for politically connected job applicants and said a new system was being established to ensure that such clout requests would be “processed and treated like any other application.” […]

“Each agency may have its own system of processing these requests and referrals, but in the interest of uniformity, and to insure the integrity of process, from this point forward, all personnel requests and referrals shall be directed” to a top official at the Department of Central Management Services, the state’s personnel and office management agency, Quinlan wrote.

“Accordingly, if someone contacts you (either in person, by telephone, mail or facsimile) regarding a personnel request or referral, you should not accept the request,” Quinlan’s memo said. “Rather, please politely inform the person making the request that, pursuant to the policies of the Governor’s Office, all such personnel requests must be directed to … CMS.”

The guy who wrote this letter, Blagojevich’s general counsel William Quinlan, is the same person who sent the memo to 15 state agencies a few weeks ago demanding all personnel records back to 2003.

And on a related note, my weekly newspaper column isn’t posted as I write this, but it should be soon.

“I’ve researched this pretty carefully,” confided a very high level Blagojevich administration official last spring over late night cocktails. “For any of this to be illegal, somebody has to profit. There has to be money involved.”

The official was responding to my questions about the swirling allegations of state contracts and jobs handed out to political insiders. Since there was no personal profit, nobody was in any serious legal danger, he claimed.

This month’s verdict in Robert Sorich’s trial, however, proved that person to be dead wrong.

It would be a big mistake to underestimate the significance of Robert Sorich’s conviction by a federal jury. Federal prosecutors never claimed that Sorich, Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley’s former patronage chief, took so much as a dollar in illegal payments.

UPDATE: The AP has a Q&A on the burgeoning scandal. Here’s one interesting section:

Q: What are some specific examples?

A: Officials aren’t providing details, but The Associated Press has found, for instance, that one person was hired for a job in a small county with few veterans but was allowed to work in Chicago. If the hiring had been done in Chicago, veterans who applied would have had priority. The Blagojevich administration also hired the son of a campaign donor but called him an intern, which exempted him from the usual hiring procedures. In fact, the administration has hired scores of politically connected people as interns.

[Emphasis added]