Years from now, the history books may well record this as the week during which the Still-Somewhat-Loosely-United States of America walked up to the edge, stared into the abyss of banana republicanism, shook its collective head, and said, “No thanks.”

But we doubt it.

After a steady stream of will-he-or-won’t-he churn about hard-left Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg’s Herculean efforts to indict Donald Trump for a seven-year-old nuisance payment to a porn star, Bragg’s office canceled the grand jury’s Wednesday meeting to regroup and, it seems, to quell dissension within his camp about the ridiculousness of his endeavor.

As Matt Margolis at PJ Media quipped, “It looks like their dreams of seeing him in handcuffs are slipping away faster than a greased pig at a rodeo.”

Somehow, though, we don’t think we’ve heard the last of this guy. Nor have we heard the last of Jim Jordan and his House Judiciary Committee.

“House Republicans,” as the Washington Examiner reports, “have slammed the potential indictment as being politically motivated and … have also requested documents and testimony from [Bragg] related to the investigation. Bragg responded to the request Thursday by arguing doing so would interfere with law enforcement and that Republican leaders only became interested in the investigation once indications had been given that Trump may be indicted.”

Funny, not funny, how Soros DAs like Bragg are notoriously soft on crime, except when they can claim a Republican scalp. That this scalp would be the first ever of a former president is all the more alluring. And corrupting.

Noted defense attorney, Harvard Law professor emeritus, and author of the book Get Trump Alan Dershowitz was, shall we say, less than enthusiastic about the merits of the case:

I have never seen a case in my 60 years of practice which has so many holes in it. Start with the statute of limitations. It’s seven years before he committed the crime. The New York State statute says the only exception for that is if his whereabouts are unknown. I have to tell you, even Bragg could have found that he was in the White House. … I don’t see how you can twist and turn to make the statute of limitations disappear. And then you have all the other. How many holes are there? Shall I count the ways? …

I think he’s worried that if he brings this case and he uses a witness who he has to know is lying, there are going to be investigations of him and there should be investigations. … So I hope he comes to his senses and doesn’t bring this case.

Another sharp legal mind, constitutional law professor Jonathan Turley, put it this way: “One would say Bragg is outside of his lane, but in this case, he’s on a completely different highway. This is an effort by a state official to effectively prosecute a federal crime, a crime that the Department of Justice decided not to prosecute. … This has the feeling of a thrill kill for many on the left, and they need to think seriously about what this [means] for the legal system.”

Earlier this week, our Mark Alexander covered “the relentless prosecutorial persecution” of the former president. As he’s noted repeatedly, the Democrats are attacking Trump for what their own people have done: “First it was the high-profile raid on Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence last August, endeavoring to indict Trump for what Hillary Clinton actually did, after failing to convict him as president for doing what Joe Biden actually did.”

What’s ahead is hard to say. But if there’s one good thing about the criminalization of politics, it’s that it tends to distract our elected representatives from passing bad legislation. Don’t just do something, we say. Stand there.

When one considers the all-consuming nature of the Democrats’ war on Donald Trump — from phony Russia collusion hoaxes to nuisance lawsuits to probes of his tax returns to illegitimate impeachments — it’s a wonder the man was able to accomplish all he did while in office.

One might’ve thought that the Democrats would’ve learned their lesson. But one would’ve been wrong.

Here, we’re reminded of the sad truth of an animal fable — the one in which the frog finally agrees to ferry the scorpion across the river, only to be stung by the deadly arthropod halfway across, causing both of them to drown.

“I’m sorry,” said the Democrat scorpion after agreeing with the Republican frog that the criminalization of our politics will be the end of us, “but I can’t help it. It’s in my nature.”

So it likely goes.

If any lesson can be learned, any warning can be heeded, from the efforts during the past seven days of a hard-left district attorney to bring a weak, petty, pathetic, gymnastically contorted, grotesquely partisan case against Donald Trump, it’s this: We’re lost as a nation if we continue to criminalize our political differences.

Sadly, though, one thing is clear: Nothing short of a prison sentence will satiate the Democrats’ sick, twisted, remorseless, Ahabian quest to GET TRUMP!!

That bodes ill for our politics. And our nation.