Palin’s key reason for resigning was inflated.

One of the main reasons Sarah Palin cited for her resignation as Alaska’s governor was frustration with “frivolous ethics violations.” She said that she didn’t want to waste “valuable state time and money, millions of your dollars” go toward responding to the charges. Palin’s office provided the Anchorage Daily News “with a breakdown of what it says are $1.9 million in costs.” However, it appears that these costs may be inflated. Most of the $1.9 million is a “per-hour accounting” of the time that state employees have spent working on the charges, even though those “state employees would have been paid regardless.” Greg Sargent notes:

But [David] Murrow, the [governor's] spokesperson, acknowledged to our reporter, Amanda Erickson, that this total was arrived at by adding up attorney hours spent on fending off complaints — based on the fixed salaries of lawyers in the governor’s office and the Department of Law. The money would have gone to the lawyers no matter what they were doing. The complaints are “just distracting them from other duties,” Murrow said.

In other words, while these lawyers might have been free to do other legal work for the state, the ethics complaints have apparently not had the real world impact Palin has claimed, and didn’t drain money away from cops, teachers, roads and other things.