It is over.

The nightmare that has enveloped the Penn-Delco School District for more than a year ended not with a bang, but with a whimper in a Delaware County courtroom.

Keith Crego, the former Aston GOP hotshot who rose to president of the Penn-Delco School Board, entered a guilty plea to a slew of charges including bribery, theft and racketeering.

Crego’s name once was attached to the meeting room where the school board conducted its meetings. Now it will simply be attached to one of the more bizarre school corruption cases in county history.

The legal process ended yesterday, but the questions remain. Lots of them.
For the actions that turned a school district upside-down for a year, and left a long list of lives in disarray, Crego was sentenced to a year in jail, 100 hours of community service, a $15,000 fine and 100 hours of community service.

“I made bad choices,” Crego told the court. Ya think?

“It is time to move on and let the district heal,” Crego commented.

That’s not exactly going down all that well back in the district.

Residents are stunned, seemingly both that many of their questions will likely now never be answered, and at the plea deal Crego cut in court yesterday.

A “disgrace” and “slap in the face” are a recurring theme.

Residents saw their school district dragged through the mud. And they knew who was responsible. They wanted their pound of flesh from the man a prosecutor called “king of the Penn-Delco castle.”

The peasants were storming the castle. Maybe they should have stormed the courthouse instead.

They point out that Crego, who faced the possibility of hundreds of years in jail on all the charges facing him, escaped with just a year behind bars.

His sentence is not all that dissimilar to one handed out to former Superintendent Leslye Abrutyn, who pleaded guilty earlier to charges of taking part in Crego’s scheme in creating the Quick Start Pre-School company, getting them set up to handle pre- and full-day child care in the district, then watching the money flow in.

Abrutyn was able to avoid jail time, she’ll serve her year with a month of electronic home monitoring and probation.

To me, the more obvious missing exclamation point is the same one I’ve been asking for months.

How exactly did Crego manage to pull this off? How did he fool so many people? How was he able to dupe someone, in Abrutyn, who seemed to have so much on the ball, and get her to go along with his scheme. And how was he able to do all this for as long as he did without anyone blowing the whistle?

Now we’ll likely never know. Yesterday, the Keith Crego and Penn-Delco saga came to a meek, sad end in a Delaware County courtroom.

The healing process, fixing the damage he left behind, is likely going to take a lot longer.