Despite the fact that they got convicted, and will most probably spend some time in prison, the G-sting verdicts couldn’t have come at a better time for ex-Clark County Commissioners Dario Herrera and Mary Kincaid-Chauncey. After all, news that breaks on Friday gets put into the little-read Saturday newspaper. In Washington, D.C. and elsewhere, savvy officials release bad news on Friday night in a process they call “taking out the trash.”

But we at Various Things & Stuff read all the coverage, and found a few interesting things therein. Let’s take a look:

• “They [the federal government] let the real criminals off, so we’ll probably go to jail. Maybe you’re better off in the system if you’re a criminal.” — Kincaid-Chauncey, after the verdicts were read, as quoted in the Review-Journal.

First, she is a criminal, having been convicted by a jury of her peers of conspiracy, wire fraud and extortion. Second, the “real criminals” she’s referring to, strip club owner Mike Galardi and ex-Commissioner Erin Kenny, jumped at the chance to make a deal. Kincaid-Chauncey had the chance to do that; she chose to fight the charges. It was a gamble, and she lost.

But that’s not to say there’s not some truth in what she’s saying: Galardi and Kenny will probably do fewer days behind bars than either Herrera or Kincaid-Chauncey, and Kenny got to keep the lion’s share of the bribes she took during her corrupt career, which is patently outrageous. It was a very sweet deal for both of the government’s star witnesses.

• “If you’re a politician, you’re dead in the water. If you’re a slutty topless club owner, you get nothing.” — Robert Chauncey, Mary Kincaid-Chauncey’s husband.

Actually, as a former cop, Chauncey should know that political corruption cases are notoriously difficult to make. Juries want ironclad proof on full-color video, like they were watching an episode of The Sopranos, and often, that’s just not how it works. (It certainly wasn’t the case here, where prosecutors had to encourage the jury to make inferences from taped evidence.)

And the only reason the slutty topless club owner got such a deal was that he recognized his guilt and turned rat almost immediately. Mary Kincaid-Chaucney still doesn’t acknowledge she did anything wrong, despite the verdicts.

• One of the charges against the defendants was wire fraud, i.e. using the phone for criminal purposes. But how, you might wonder, is that a federal matter? After all, Galardi and his alleged bagman, ex-Commissioner Lance Malone, were both in Las Vegas when talking on their cell phones for most of the Nevada portion of the G-sting case.

Whoops. It turns out they were using Nextel, which has a transmission tower in California, which means the calls made use of interstate wires, which means it is a federal crime.

A stretch? Perhaps. One wag this weekend guessed that future cell phone customers who have nefarious intent might want to ask their cell provider if all their equipment is located within the state of Nevada, or if any crosses state lines.

What if it had happened entirely within Nevada? Our guess is we’d still be waiting for local authorities to take up the case.

• And that brings us to this: Three cheers for the FBI and the U.S. attorney for the district of Nevada, Dan Bogden. As we’ve said, these are hard cases to make; the bureau’s special agents and Bogden’s prosecutors, especially Assistant U.S. Attorney Daniel Schiess, did a remarkable job. (Even we at Various Things & Stuff doubted the defendants would get convicted after hearing the defense case.)

“Their purpose is promoting the public good. A violation of that strikes at the very foundation of our government,” Bogden said of public officials. We couldn’t agree more. And we think other local law-enforcement officials are starting to catch on as well.

• We thought we’d catalogued all of Herrera’s many and varied ethics violations, until we read R-J lead G-sting trial reporter Adrienne Packer’s comprehensive sidebar.

Man, that guy was a crook!

Props, by the way, to Packer, who wrote compelling and interesting stories on the trial for the duration. Trials are 95 percent tedium and 5 percent high drama, which makes covering them something of a challenge. Packer deserves credit for a job well done.