One more, and perhaps the most important, question about Jay Mariotti leaving the Sun-Times

Now that Jay Mariotti has left the Chicago Sun-Times and, one can hope, the city, there's one more question that begs to be asked:

Who decided to keep Mariotti on the paper in the face of his obvious and many failings? Who decided to sign him to a multi-year contract while the paper is mired in the depths of its worst financial crisis?

One has to assume that editor-in-chief Michael Cooke is ultimately responsible. Cooke is the latest in a long list of out-of-town editors inflicted on the paper by a parade of different owners, some of whom had no clue about the special nature of Chicago journalism and its newspaper readers.

If Cooke is responsible, how odd it seems that he now seems glad to see Mariotti gone. ''We wish Jay well and will miss him -- not personally, of course -- but in the sense of noticing he is no longer here, at least for a few days," Cooke said.

He told Chicago Reader media critic Michael Miner: "We’re not hearing from grief-stricken fans. The truth is quite the opposite. Quite the opposite. We've gotten hundreds of e-mails, including ones that say 'Now we’ll buy the paper.' By all indications our circulation will go up."

Too bad it took so long for someone to figure it out.