For quite some time, I've known that the boxes taken by Elections Canada officials during the April visit to Conservative Party headquarters didn't actually get very far.

Sorry, but I really couldn't say anything.

Indeed, the boxes stopped well short of the door as Conservative Party lawyers challenged Elections Canada on the relevance of the material taken to the so-called In-and-Out Affair.

You have to remember that Elections Canada made off with a huge amount of material:

Conservatives party operatives and those in government interviewed for this story said they are trying to determine what classified material Elections Canada might have seized - and worrying that it could be released in a court case.

After two days of unfettered access to the party headquarters, Elections Canada made replicas of all their computer hard drives, carted off 17 boxes of documents, and copied all of the party's emails, Tory officials said.

Polling and advertising data, voter information, and documented descriptions of the party's electoral tactics are all among the things that would have been stored at Tory headquarters.

The Conservatives initiated a fight on this point:

The party said Thursday that 17 boxes of documents, five envelopes and seven computer hard drives contain privileged legal advice and material that's irrelevant to an Elections Canada probe.

The allegedly irrelevant material is believed to include copious emails that have nothing to do with election spending.

"I can't get into the specifics," [Conservative spokesperson Ryan] Sparrow said, "but I can say that our lawyers are working with Elections Canada on this matter."

Well, chalk this one as a win for the Conservatives.  Nearly everything had to be returned, deemed irrelevant, and what they kept was, by and large, stuff Elections Canada already had.  From an email:

The vast majority of what was seized was returned since it was not relevant. The vast vast majority of what they retained is information we had provided them already.  We have nothing to hide.

What is a vast majority?  We're talking something like 85% of the stuff lugged out of the offices by Elections Canada investigators had nothing to do with the investigation, and is no longer in the possession of Elections Canada. 

To be more accurate, it was never in the possession of Elections Canada, but in limbo while relevancy was being determined.

But I bet it made for great television watching box after box come out of the office.   Canadians assumed that Elections Canada now had more evidence of Conservative wrongdoing than you could shake a stick at. 

Seventeen boxes?  Who knew Conservatives were hiding so much?

I mean, it's not like a trained investigators would seize material that was irrelevant or already in their possession.  You'd expect some material would be taken in error, but virtually all of it?

Except that's exactly what seems to have happened.

The parade of boxes was just eye candy for the cameras.  Canadians didn't get to see almost all the boxes come back.

After returning all the stuff that should not have been taken in the first place, virtually everything that remained was stuff Elections Canada already had. 

Take away the irrelevant stuff, and take away the stuff the Elections Canada already had, and you end up with an unimpressively small pile.  No one has suggested the Conservatives would not have handed over that material had Elections Canada bothered to ask for it. 

All in all, the "raid" was an impressive media event, but legally, it seemed to accomplish nothing.

Unless the point was to stage a media event and derail the deposition of Elections Canada officials that had been scheduled for the next day.  If you believe that, then grabbing all that material made sense, if just to get it out of the hands of the Conservatives for a short time, and force the Conservative Party to fight to get its property back.  So what if the material ultimately had to be returned. The raid served its purpose, unrelated to the gathering of evidence.

If you believe that.