The announcement from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and James Comey, its director, that Hillary Clinton will not face prosecution over her use of email represents an important inflection point in this Clinton scandal. But it is not the end.

How do we know that? Because Clinton scandals never end. They continue long after their purported original sin is forgotten and multiple investigations prove that there was nothing much there to begin with. We are still talking about the Vince Foster scandal, the allegation that the Clintons murdered their aide in 1993. That scandal is now into a third decade of groundless innuendo.

The email inquiry is a perfect example of this scandal-industrial complex and its capacity for perpetual motion. It began with investigations into the 2012 terrorist attack on the US mission in Benghazi. Those investigations found no wrongdoing by Mrs Clinton but in the process uncovered the widely known secret that Mrs Clinton used a personal email server for official business.