They might have wanted an act of Congress that would cut off opponents' ability to challenge the project in court again. The existence, or even the possibility, of such a law could have pushed environmental activists who were negotiating with UDOT to strike a deal to get the Davis County-to-Salt Lake City expressway built sooner rather than later.

What is hard to understand, and impossible to justify, was best expressed by the inimitable Dr. Strangelove: "The whole point of the doomsday machine is lost if you keep it a secret! Vy didn't you tell the verld, ay?"

UDOT officials did not abandon or openly badmouth the negotiations - which by June had yielded a preliminary settlement that hasn't been made public yet. They did not allow as how they might need a backup plan to counter the critics' not-so-secret weapon of more lawsuits if they didn't get what they wanted.

Instead, UDOT engaged in secret dealings with Sen. Orrin Hatch and other members of the Utah congressional delegation in a failed attempt at passing one of those dark-of-night conference committee add-ons that gives the legislative process such a bad name. In this case, instead of a huge pork barrel tunnel or bridge, the amendment would have been a special provision that, once the current environmental review was done, would have kept Legacy Highway free of any further litigation.

What's seriously distressing about all that is not the defensible position that there should be an end to all the court action, which delays the project and adds to its cost. It's the deceptive stance taken by the state, not only with their opposite numbers from the Sierra Club and Utahns for Better Transportation, but also with the public, in denying any role in Hatch's attempt to ram the project through.

E-mails from Washington to Salt Lake City and back again, unearthed by a Tribune open records request, have blown UDOT's cover as a good-faith negotiator with environmental groups and, fairly or not, make the state out to be just the sort of bulldozer-happy bully that the anti-Legacy people have always feared it was.

That might get Legacy built. But it won't build much of a legacy for Utahns' faith in their government.