Mary Ann Akers, who blogs at washingtonpost.com’s The Sleuth, has confirmed that about which a snarky (her adjective) Senate aide had gloated to her earlier: the McCain for President, 20’08 bumper sticker has been partially removed from the back bumper of the car in which Senate Homeland Security Committee Chairman Joe Lieberman (I-Connecticut) is driven.

A Senate aide reports to the Sleuth: “I was in my car on Constitution Avenue in front of the National Gallery waiting for the light to change when I noticed that lo and behold who but Joe Lieberman himself was in the car sitting next to me. He was being driven by a young male staffer and was furiously scrolling through his blackberry. When the light turned green, they pulled ahead of me and I saw a McCain 2008 sticker on the rear bumper, half scratched off!”

The inference, of course, was that Joementum had the sticker removed before the vote of the Senate Dem caucus on his future as chairman of Homeland Security, but an anonymous source connected to Lieberman tells the WashPost blogger that the bumper sticker was partially scraped off by another car in an accident which occurred prior to the November 4 Election Day.

This is serious stuff, folks.

So… was the attempt at bumper sticker removal made after the election but prior to, as the WashPost blogger puts it, Lieberman “fac[ed] a jury of his Democratic colleagues” about his chairmanship, in order not to “remind his liberal colleagues why they no longer like him?” Or was the sticker partially effaced prior to the election; as the WashPost blogger insists, “when Lieberman thought he still had a shot at becoming secretary of state in a McCain administration.”

This scandal calls for Bob Woodward book, complete with fictionalized dialogue and events involving actual public figures. (Something like this, this, or this.)

And why not investigate what troubles Politico.com’s Glenn Thrush: Dems let Lieberman keep his Homeland Security post, where Dems see him as soft on Bush, but loses his chairmanship of Environment and Public Works Committee, where he’s bashed Bush on global warming.

After all, folks, this past Presidential election had a winner and it had a loser. It is now time, some would have it, for the winning side to relieve the losers of plenty o’ political blood. Vengeance during sillier season.