Since it first began to unfold in December 2008, the Madoff case has been almost beyond belief:

A former Chairman of the NASDAQ, managing billions of dollars for many of the world's largest and most prestigious institutions, is a complete fraud?

His supposed investment advisory business that for decades appeared to be among Wall Street's most successful and which managed thousands of clients' money was, in his words, "all just one big lie?"

Every trade, every order ticket, every account statement, every confirmation and all other relevant records reflected on millions of pages sent to customers were fictitious?

These facts and countless others that have emerged in the Madoff case boggle the mind, but try pondering this for a moment: what if Madoff's ultimate arrest by the FBI in December 2008 had occurred not in his apartment in New York... but in his office in Washington, D.C. as Chairman of the SEC! According to the SEC Inspector General's Madoff report, when examiners from the SEC's Northeast Regional Office were scrutinizing Madoff's firm in 2005,

"Madoff would drop the names of high-up people in the SEC. Madoff told them that Christopher Cox was going to be the next Chairman of the SEC a few weeks prior to Cox being officially named. He also told them that Madoff himself "was on the short list" to be the next Chairman of the SEC."

The report provides no support for Madoff's claim that he was on any "short list" to be the next SEC Chairman, and Madoff's credibility is surely as low as any person's on this planet, but the idea of Madoff's scheme being uncovered while he was serving as SEC Chairman is so mind-blowing that it seems like something that could only occur in a bad movie. It will be very interesting to learn whether there is any truth to that statement.