THE Court of Appeals has spoken on the Nursing board exam scandal: some 17,000 of the more than 42,000 examinees can take their oath as new nurses as they did not appear to have benefited from the leakage.

The honorable court’s move has stopped dead on the tracks any attempt to further prolong the agony of the expectant nurses, a deep anxiety that, by force of circumstance, is shared by Pangasinenses because the topnotcher of that controversial June 2006 board exam happens to be a Pangasinense, Gringo Sandiego. Until the veil of doubt is lifted thru the action of a competent court such as the CA, the honor that Sandiego brought to the province thru his performance in the exam was at the very least, less edifying. When he is finally sworn in along with the other passers, it is as if he has been given the seal of worthiness, and the province, a saved face.

And yet, we are among those who believe that — regardless of whether other parties will throw new monkey wrenches on the imminent oath-taking or not in the following days — the real exam manipulators, those who actually cooked up the leakage to include the three prominent review centers being cited by the National Bureau of Investigation, must be punished. They have not only shamed their institution and calling; they have shamed the entire country. No amount of justification or indeed even verbal penance can ever undo the damage they have wrought overnight to a profession that is virtually a dollar-earner for the country.

Indeed, by extension, they and all their cohorts in or out of the government can even be charged for economic sabotage.

Labor Secretary Arturo Brion is right: The government is now left with no choice but to bear down, and bear down hard, on the identified main suspects, after the examinees, most of them anyway, have practically been absolved of wrongdoing. Let the chips fall where they may.