If you're caught standing over a bullet-ridden body with a smoking Tommy gun in your hands, and there are witnesses who will testify, against their best interests, that you pulled the trigger, at some point the smart move is to cop to the crime and move on.
But let's not talk about Russia's plot to rig the U.S. general election in favour of Donald Trump just yet.
For the moment, the focus is on the belated admission by Anna Antseliovich, the acting director-general of Russia's anti-doping agency, that her country's Olympic athletes did, in fact, systematically hack the system with the blessing of the government.
Ms. Antseliovich concedes that lab workers swapped thousands of steroid-tainted urine samples for clean ones with the help of national security agents at the Sochi Winter Games and other events. The Russian sports ministry provided spreadsheets of the names of athletes whose urine was to be swapped in the event they won a medal, and the deputy sports minister covered it up.
This methodical cheating was exposed this year by the World Anti-Doping Agency, and corroborated by a detailed on-the-record confession from Ms. Antseliovich's predecessor.
Faced with the evidence, the international track-and-field body, the IAAF, banned Russian track athletes from the Rio games. But Russia continued to play innocent, and it got a boost from its favourite enabler, the International Olympic Committee, which inexcusably refused to extend the Rio ban to all Russian athletes.
The question is, why has Russia come clean now?
Here's one idea: Ms. Antseliovich and Russian sports officials insist in monotone unison that the cheating was never state-sponsored. Given Vladimir Putin's centralized control of the state, that seems unlikely. By confessing now, Russia may be hoping to head off further investigations that could implicate the President.
The Russians would like their uncontrite confession to be the first step on the road to redemption. But by being so dirty, and by taking so long to come clean in the face of such overwhelming evidence, they have foregone that option. The IOC should ban Russia for four years at a minimum, and strip all of its tainted athletes of their medals from the Sochi games. Anything less will amount to complicity with the Russian cheatocracy.