Any regular citizen has every right to defend himself against a barrage of very public accusations and allegations being made in his or her respect. This is a right guaranteed at law and it is one that no one could argue with.

But the problem with the Prime Minister’s chief of staff’s criminal complaint filed this week against the Opposition Leader is that the former is no ordinary citizen and the allegations and accusations the latter has made against him are, similarly, far from ordinary.

In his criminal complaint, the chief of staff, Keith Schembri, calls on the police to take action against Opposition leader Simon Busuttil for fabricating facts he knows to be untrue and for taking false oaths in the court applications Busuttil has filed against him.

This, however, appears to be no more than a tit-for-tat situation, and one that could easily be dealt with by the magistrates leading the three inquiries – one on kickbacks from the sales of passports, another on suspicious payments made to Adrian Hillman and the third for money laundering allegations revealed by the Panama Papers. The first two were based on documents drafted from investigations carried out by the Financial Intelligence Analysis Unit that were leaked to him.

It is strange indeed to request the police to investigate such matters when the magistrates tasked with the resulting inquiries would undoubtedly take their own action against Busuttil if the evidence he presented to them was false and if he indeed lied under oath.

Schembri’s bone of contention appears to be Busuttil’s latest application in which he asked the courts to launch a magisterial inquiry into Schembri and Tourism Minister Konrad Mizzi after they were caught acquiring companies in Panama last year, to see whether money laundering laws were breached. His claims mainly stem from documented material from the Panama Papers that were published by this and another media house that have access to those Panama Papers.

In his criminal complaint, Schembri claims Busuttil’s application is legally unsustainable because what Busuttil is requesting is already subject to a magisterial inquiry which Busuttil himself requested.

But by that same token, it appears that Schembri’s criminal complaint is equally unsustainable, a fact which calls the reason behind the criminal complaint into serious question.

Busuttil describes Schembri’s actions as ‘an attack against the Maltese population and democracy’, but in reality, it smacks more of tit-for-tat petty politics.

The chief of staff really and truly should hold off and wait for the conclusions of the magisterial inquiries, initiated at the behest of the Opposition leader, that are underway in his respect. And, if and when the courts clear him of wrongdoing, then take remedial action against Busuttil.

In a normal country, this is what would have happened. But time and time again, it is being demonstrated that Malta in 2017 is no normal country.

In fact, what will be interesting to see is how quickly and assiduously the police force acts on the criminal complaint after serially refusing to investigate anything related to the Panama Papers and after all those reports from the Financial Intelligence Analysis Unit on the chief of staff have served no purpose but to gather dust on shelves.

In fact, Busuttil had taken those claims to the magistrates only after it transpired that the police failed to do anything about them for more than a year.

The whole situation, as serious as it is, is quickly descending further into the territory of farce and the sooner those magisterial inquiries are wrapped up and published the better.