So, at long last, Hunter Biden has been criminally charged by federal authorities — apparently in the most minimal way possible. According to the initial reports, the president’s 53-year-old ne’er-do-well son has reached a negotiated deal to plead guilty to two tax misdemeanors, for which he will apparently face no jail time, and pre-trial diversion on the entirely open-and-shut case that he violated federal firearms laws by possessing a gun while being “an unlawful user of or addicted to any controlled substance,” a charge that statutorily carries up to ten years in prison. That charge derives from him lying on the form he submitted to obtain a gun, which he then brandished on camera while high on drugs with a prostitute, before he subsequently lost the gun. Once upon a time, his supposedly tough-on-guns father was a champion of federal laws against this sort of thing.

There are a couple of immediate takeaways here, with the standard caution that we don’t have all the facts yet.

First, there was an enormous amount of foot-dragging here, especially on the gun charges (tax charges always take some time to build). It should not have taken this long. It is hard to avoid the suspicion that these charges would never have been brought at all but for the need to provide some appearance of holding plain criminality in the president’s family to any standard at all, while the Justice Department was prosecuting Donald Trump. In that sense, these charges are not much, but they are the tribute vice pays to virtue.

Second, it’s a lot easier to work out a sweetheart deal if your friends and family run the DOJ. But: It still requires that you cooperate. Trump is in hot water in part because he took such a hard adversarial line — and in the real world, that matters.

Third, the charges here seem surgically calculated to insulate the president and the rest of the Biden family. Nothing here implicates millions of dollars flowing through shell accounts to the Bidens from shady or tyrannical foreign regimes. Nothing here relates to mishandling of classified documents. If you’re Joe Biden, having the DOJ mostly painlessly resolve the only other sources of leverage it had over Hunter Biden is cause for relief.

Fourth, it is theoretically possible, but massively unlikely, that this is a deal for Hunter to cooperate in other investigations. We likely would see some sign of that. He’s not pleading to anything that involves admitting he was engaged in criminal activity in concert with anyone else. So, it is safe to assume that this simply puts a bow on his status as a target of federal investigations. Delaware U.S. attorney David Weiss, a Trump appointee kept on for appearances to oversee this investigation, will probably leave office now.

Fifth, we’ve been treated for some years now to much liberal and progressive mockery of the notion that Hunter Biden was a worthy subject of federal investigation. It’s hard to sustain that posture now that there are guilty pleas.

Sixth, however, while this is a very lenient deal for a normal person, it is also the case that Hunter Biden would not have been in this mess if he hadn’t been unable to control the simplest of impulses. He may not yet be out of jeopardy for probation violations if that recurs.