JEFFERSON CITY — He doesn't remember.

After three news conferences in one month on the subject of E. coli tests at the Lake of the Ozarks, Gov. Jay Nixon doesn't remember when or how he first received bad information about what his office knew and when it knew it.

On Friday, after firing the longtime aide who kept private a report showing elevated bacteria levels in the lake, it was clear Nixon was trying to make this bad news go away — and with it, a Republican-led committee investigating the mess.

"It's my hope and expectation that they will wrap this up very soon," Nixon said of the Senate committee led by Sen. Brad Lager, R-Savannah.

That committee has become a thorn in Nixon's side, interviewing staff members and seeking documents and finding contradictions in the stories that have come out of the governor's office.

Lager's group revealed the damaging news that Nixon's office knew of the withheld testing results long before it admitted it, even after telling the public that nobody in the governor's office was aware of the report's existence.

Lager said there are still questions to be answered.

Among them is a fairly simple one.

When did Nixon become aware that he was passing inaccurate information to the public when he said nobody in his office knew of the testing results?

On Friday, I asked that question.

"I'm not exactly sure," Nixon said.

He stammered a bit, admitted that his staff made mistakes, but didn't really answer the question. It would make sense that the governor would want to know.

We do know that when the Department of Natural Resources gave Nixon bad information about beaches being closed after bad E. coli tests — the beaches were actually open — that he was too mad for words. The governor was so mad that he suspended his director of the Department of Natural Resources and appointed a longtime aide to do a two-week review to get to the bottom of the situation.

So, it seems natural to ask how the governor's own staff gave him bad information.

Did it come from spokesman Jack Cardetti, who admitted knowing about the testing results even when he told reporters that nobody in the governor's office knew of them?

Did it come from chief of staff John Watson, who was the liaison with the DNR and had met with Director Mark Templeton around the time the results were available?

How, indeed, did it come about that Nixon himself passed on incorrect information to the public?

"This is a very busy job," Nixon said.

"It's not a single data point," he continued.

And finally: "I just don't remember."

Responses like that simply add fuel to Lager's fire.

So, too, does the fact that Nixon didn't ask Bryan to even file a report about his two-week inquiry into the DNR. So we are left to wonder. Did he find any new information that led Nixon to fire Joe Bindbeutel, or did the governor just succumb to the pressure that had been building for three months?

"We still have questions that need to be answered," Lager said after Nixon's latest attempt to make this controversy go away.

Lager said he now intends to go back and interview some of the people such as Templeton and Bindbeutel who have already spoken to Senate staffers.

The questions no longer have anything to do with whether the Lake of the Ozarks is clean or dirty. Nixon has put an end to that inquiry.

It's filthy, and it has been for years, with wastewater from old septic tanks and bad sewer systems dumping into various coves with little to no accountability. Just this past weekend, the DNR closed Public Beach No. 1 there after fresh tests showed the presence of E. coli nearby.

Nixon promises to do what no governor before him has done: clean up the lake.

The irony of Nixon's dilemma is this: If he has any hope of escaping the political damage done by this cover-up and his sudden memory loss, he might need to stop trying to crawl out from under it and instead keep pounding the drum of lake cleanup.

Nixon said the DNR has already inspected 274 of 400 sites at the Lake of the Ozarks that have storm-water permits. He said new procedures will be put in place to inform the public when the waters turn murky from discharges of waste.

And he said that he hopes this controversy will become a "pivot point for public policy."

Indeed, the most important question might be asked not by Lager but by voters in 2012.

When it comes time to vote for the next governor, what will they remember?