Then, shalt thou count to three. No more. No less. Three shalt be the number thou shalt count, and the number of the counting shall be three. Four shalt thou not count, neither count thou two, excepting that thou then proceed to three. Five is right out

"What?!" exclaim the readers who were paying attention, both of you. "Has not Another Kiwi already covered the story of your Pry Mincer hobnobbing with unsavoury types like that plausibly-deniable dirt-conduit and widely-loathed shitweasel Roncame Isopod* ?" Well, yes, AK did that, but the word "hobnob" set him off on one of his turns, and right now he is engrossed in writing sternly-worded memos for the smoko-room notice-board about the Chocolate Biscuit Replacement Roster, so he will not notice if we revisit the imbroglio.

Let us approach it, this time, from the direction of Freud's Kettle. This is the poor country relative in the domain of Philosophical Kitchen Utensils, with Russell's Teapot and Wittgenstein's Poker hogging all the attention.

it was not a pot of which one could
say, Pot, Pot, and be comforted

It is a special case of the Rule of Three governing narrative enumerations and itemisations. Freud held that the optimal number of mutually-contradictory accusations or excuses is three. Just as with breasts, or pints of Viper Heavily-Fortified Cider, two are unsatisfying while four are over-egging the lily.
Our own Pry Mincer was able to oblige with an example (thanks to the vast reserves of Narrativium lying beneath the Central Plateau of NZ's North Island).* The underlying political scandal is hard to encapsulate, nor is it something you want to know too much about, due to the unedifying nature of the personalities involved. Suffice to say that his operatives were found to have colluded with Mr Isopod in the release of incorrect but politically-damaging claims about the Leader of the Opposition, just prior to the 2011 election. NZ journamalists, having taken part in that smear campaign at the time, are now looking for someone else to be responsible for it, so they keep asking awkward questions of the Right Hon. JohnKey.

So we get these weird parallel-universe interviews, in which the Right-Hon insists that the Gwyn Report actually vindicated himself and his staff, because

1. His staff didn't send any information to Mr Isopod.
2. What they did was not illegal because the information had been declassified just before they sent it.
3. He himself was overseas at the time.

This is not the first appearance of Mr Isopod at Riddled.

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* False name, used on the advice of Trahison & Clerisy, Riddled legal advisors.
** The Rule of Three demands that two other examples of Freud's Kettle should follow. Here is one from the anti-vaccination oeuvre of Christina England, a bodily-fluid-purity obsessive who is sadly excluded through accident of birth from admission into the Encyclopedia of American Loons. And here she is again.