Yesterday’s Chi Trib p-1 headline story on Obama’s wife was classic puffery. Today’s Sun-Times story about Obama and the indicted Tony Rezko is what Chicago newspapers are supposed to be doing.

For more than five weeks during the brutal winter of 1997, tenants shivered without heat in a government-subsidized apartment building on Chicago’s South Side.

It was just four years after the landlords — Antoin “Tony’ Rezko and his partner Daniel Mahru — had rehabbed the 31-unit building in Englewood with a loan from Chicago taxpayers.

Rezko and Mahru couldn’t find money to get the heat back on.

But their company, Rezmar Corp., did come up with $1,000 to give to the political campaign fund of Barack Obama, the newly elected state senator whose district included the unheated building.

That’s the lede. The choicest excerpts have to do with legalistic stonewalling by Obama’s people:

Obama . . .  was associated with the firm for more than nine years, his staff acknowledged Sunday in an e-mail response to questions submitted March 14 by the Sun-Times. They didn’t say what deals he worked on — or how much work he did.

And:

For five weeks, the Sun-Times sought to interview Obama about Rezko and the housing deals. His staff wanted written questions. It responded Sunday but left many questions unanswered. Other answers didn’t directly address the question.

Among these: When did Obama learn of Rezmar’s financial problems? “The senator had no special knowledge of any financial problems,’ Gibbs wrote.

Did the senator ever complain to anyone — government officials, Rezmar or Rezko — about the conditions of Rezmar’s buildings? “Senator Obama did follow up on constituency complaints about housing as [a] matter of routine,’ Gibbs wrote.

Did the senator ever discuss Rezmar’s financial problems with anyone at his law firm? “The firm advises us that it [is] unaware of any such conversations,’ Gibbs wrote.

There is much, much more, from Obama going to work for these people as part of his own ballyhooed war on poverty to his getting a sweet deal from Rezko on his Hyde Park mansion, with lots of donations and fund-raising in between.  The two have been very close.

Obama apparently — hell, obviously — turned a blind eye while Rezko took public money and paid no attention to the buildings that housed, or stored, people in need of so-called affordable housing. Rezko and friends apparently — hell, obviously — took one look at Obama as a black Harvard law star and saw him as marketable.

In the words of Paul Powell of Springfield-looting fame, they smelled the meat a’cookin’. So do a lot of people.