This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2017, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.

This is not the first time that a government or business leader has refused to admit he did anything wrong. And promised to never do it again.

Gov. Gary Herbert agreed last week to end his efforts to stop passing federal dollars through to the Utah chapter of Planned Parenthood. That makes sense, as his 2015 move to attack the organization was not only rightly thwarted at two levels of the federal court system, it was also based on a lie.

Not Herbert's lie. But a lie nevertheless.

Last week's court filing and the statements from the governor's office never admit that.

The statement from Herbert's communications director Paul Edwards said, in part, "This agreement demonstrates the state's ongoing commitment to and practice of not terminating contracts for unconstitutional reasons."

Even though that is exactly what Herbert had done.

It all started more than two years ago when some anti-abortion crusaders who purport to be a medical organization engaged in a second level of deception by posing as representatives of a nonexistent medical outfit that was supposedly in the market for tissue from aborted fetuses.

The scheme involved recording secret video of some representatives of Planned Parenthood clinics in California and deceptively editing the resulting footage to make it appear as though the clinics were not just covering their legitimate costs, as is legal, but making illegal profits from the sale of fetal tissue to medical researchers.

Some of the comments made by the clinic officials were tasteless and not properly respectful of the subject matter or the women who agreed to donate the tissue. But, after legal authorities in a dozen states looked into the matter, it was determined that nothing the clinics did was illegal.

In fact the investigations in Texas and California not only cleared Planned Parenthood, they resulted in the filing of criminal charges against the perpetrators of the deception. (The Texas charges were soon dropped, on the grounds that the grand jury that brought them had exceeded its mandate.)

Even if the Planned Parenthood clinics in other states had been up to no good, the Utah chapter is not responsible for the actions of affiliates in other states. Taking away its contracts made as much sense as would moving to impeach the Republican governor of Utah because the Republican governor of New Jersey might have been up to some illegal skulduggery.

It was obvious at the time that Herbert's move to cut off funds for the health education and research programs that Utah's Planned Parenthood provides was about looking good to the true believers who would be eying him at the state Republican convention held the very next day.

It was a short-term pander that took almost two years to put behind us, based on what we now call fake news.

Let's hope neither the governor nor anyone else among Utah's governing class is so gullible again.