It never ends cleanly in this country. Sara Duterte thought the Office of the Vice President was her inheritance. Congress just reminded her it’s a job.

After she snubbed plenary hearings and ducked questions about millions in public funds, the OVP did not merely lose its shine; it’s gutted. The once-mighty P2.3-billion office now limps along at P733 million, starved by the same Congress that once indulged her delusion of untouchability.

Lawmakers called it disciplinary; Sara calls it persecution, a witch hunt, another episode in the long-running series where she’s the victim and everyone else is corrupt.

Beneath the cloak: evasion, with claims of orchestration by Congress as the alibi. She stands alone now, without the Uniteam or a friendly legislature to carry the lie.

Now she says she can’t talk. Citing the Supreme Court. The funds were “confidential.” The “pending” case. But the contempt predates the formal complaint.

For years, she’s ridden the fumes of her base, twisting criticism and pointed procedures into victimhood. Every time she’s caught, she plays the card: persecution, as if overseeing her is cruel.

If power unexamined is corruption’s softest bed, Sara Duterte is tainting the integrity of her office. A veep who acts because she can is a warning for what a president might become.

Did Congress really clip the Dutertes’ wings? Or just stop pretending they could fly above the law?

If anything, it’s what’s left of the system trying not to collapse under their sense of entitlement. Curtailing the OVP budget was the bare minimum.

She flies when she wants, spends what she wants, still thinks asking “why” disrespects the rank. Scrutiny annoys her, oversight offends her. You can see it in how she sits through hearings. When she bothers to show up at all. The slouch of someone waiting for the world to end on her terms.

You do not delegitimize an institution, demand conditions, insult the power of the purse, then cry persecution when the check bounces. That’s a VP telling the nation: rules do not apply to me.

The office has drawn over P2 billion at its fattest, impressive for a symbolic post that was never meant to do much more than wave, smile and stay out of the way. Yet Sara still acts like she’s running a kingdom, and demands the budget to match the scale of her delusion.

Every institution built to check her power has a choice: enforce the law, or admit it no longer can.

And her supporters, God bless their stamina, might want to ask themselves if it’s loyalty they’re showing, or just the slow death of common sense.

You can set your watch by it: Sara vanishes when questioned, snarls when pressed, swings first when patience would’ve worked. Find one moment in her career that wasn’t ruled by impulse. We’ll wait.

If the missed hearings are an act of contempt, the unaccounted pesos a quiet admission that the rules were never meant for her, what is Sara Z. Duterte telling the nation?