After days of figuring out what to do, the Hewlett-Packard board has finally decided to throw Chairwoman Patricia Dunn to the wolves, but in a nice kind of way. The board has decided that she can stay on until January, reports USA Today. Next year she’ll be replaced by CEO Mark Hurd.

Dunn had ordered an investigation of leaks to the press about board deliberations and that got the company’s investigators involved with some pretty shady information broking practices including “pretexting” or signing up to read other people’s phone bills. Finding such fine people as the H-P board playing with these low-life high-tech gumshoes drew the attention of the FBI and Congress. The legislators presumably don’t want to find themselves unmasked if a pretexter were to find their number on the cell phone bill of a reporter.

In any case, it will have been a scandal worth watching if Congress finally acts to protect privacy and makes it a real crime to read other people’s phone bills. After all, it’s identity theft.