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And, if you look at news photos and video clips carefully, many in the angry mob swarming the Mercedes had green skin, indicating that they must have come from outer space.

Point is, whatever happened at the Interior Ministry on that day, who cares?

It had been a war with no rules all along, and that moment was no different, so what's the use of whining or trying to pinpoint who did what or who was where? We have abused so many principles for such a long time that anyone who cries foul will end up a sad joke.

There are two contrasting stories, so take your pick. The first one has Abhisit narrowly escaping a potentially fatal ambush that could have paved the way for bloody anarchy and a possible power shift. The other has the "ambush" either completely "staged" or made to look much more terrible by infiltrators in order to discredit the red shirts and justify a subsequent crackdown.

To the neutrals, neither story matters that much, and neither is more comforting than the other. We have two scenarios here - a government framing its own people to cook up an excuse for the use of force against "peaceful" protesters, and "violent" activists hell-bent on lynching a national leader.

Whether Abhisit was actually in that car or not, we can't really feel any better either way.

What's interesting, though, is how the partisans treat the respective scenarios. If you are pro-Abhisit, you tend to believe he was in the car, but you wouldn't lose sleep if there was evidence that he was in fact hiding somewhere else. If you are pro-red, of course, the ambush was staged - but if government politicians had died, it would have been a revolution going out of control.

And what if Abhisit wasn't in the car but the red shirts attacked it in the belief that he was? Does that make their whole action less heinous?

On the other hand, if he was in the car but the attack was staged, does this mean the red shirts "lied" to the public by claiming he wasn't in it?

Whatever the truth is, the "ambush" was an outgrowth of a symptom that has never been properly treated. It won't do either side any good to provoke a debate on something that senseless. After all, if people had cared about right and wrong, the controversial incident would not have happened in the first place.

We should let bygones be bygones; not that we can do anything about them, though. What matters is how we can haul ourselves up after sinking that low. Finding out how the attack was carried out will not help, as it was an act executed at the height of a nasty battle in which many dirty tactics were employed. Only when we can answer the question "why" it happened will there be a light at the end of the tunnel.

Some say that Thais were lucky, reasoning that with the military and police split and seeming ready to switch allegiance - while shadowy elements were lurking in the background - last month could have easily been the most tragic period in our modern political history. If we really were that fortunate, the question is whether we realise it.

Maybe it's time we ignored all the intrigues. Of course, it's fascinating to discuss who planted the "car bomb" purportedly intended to kill Thaksin Shinawatra, or who wanted to assassinate his arch-rival Sondhi Limthongkul, or whether or not Abhisit was in that black Mercedes, but political mysteries in Thailand are mostly meant to exploit, not puzzle, us. If you want some fun putting together the jigsaw pieces, fine, but never fall into the trap by taking these things too seriously.

There are limits to how many intrigues a nation can take. Americans learned some time ago that there is life after JFK, no matter how lame the official line on his assassination was. The truth may still be buried but if the world's greatest democracy is comfortable with that, who are we to demand to know Abhisit's whereabouts on April 12 and try to extract moral lessons from the possible answers?

When we watch photos or videos of the Interior Ministry episode, we just look at casualties of war. Nothing more, nothing less.