Two years ago, FBI agent Peter Strzok was a chief lieutenant to now-disgraced and unemployed FBI Director James Comey. Strzok played a key role in two major investigations — the one into Hillary Clinton’s illegal transmission of classified information over a private email server and the other of alleged collusion between Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and Russia, which by the way was based on that phony, Clinton-funded dossier. We learned in 2017, via uncovered texts with his FBI mistress, that Strzok’s anti-Trump bias was a serious problem, and that, like Comey and former Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, Strzok’s higher loyalty was to Clinton. Both the texts and the illicit affair were grounds for his firing two years ago.

Instead, after 22 years at the bureau, Strzok was finally fired Friday — two years too late, albeit one year after being removed from Robert Mueller’s investigation. Moreover, according to Strzok’s attorney, he was fired only after Deputy Director David Bowdich took the rare step of overruling the FBI’s Office of Professional Responsibility, which recommended only a suspension.

After the damning inspector general’s report in June, Strzok gave a contemptuous congressional testimony insisting on his innocence. No one should believe him.

More than anything else, this lagging timeline — the fact that only now is this bad apple fired — is an indication of what is wrong with government. Entrenched bureaucracy, which sometimes becomes the so-called “deep state,” is cancerous and difficult to remove. Think of the immense effort required to fire Strzok and McCabe in particular, and then ponder how many other Clintonistas remain fixed in the bowels of government.

Yet much of this comes from the top. Presidential attorney Rudy Giuliani hit the nail on the head, saying, “I’m going to tell you who was the quarterback for all of this. Strzok — he’s a bit of a puppet. Then there’s Mueller — he’s a puppet. … The guy running it is [former CIA Director John] Brennan. And he should be in front of a grand jury.” Brennan, who once voted communist in a presidential election, was indeed Barack Obama’s hatchet man behind the whole Russia fiasco. Removing Strzok is good, but we’re a long way from justice.