I don’t trust the latest staff shakeups in the White House. First Karl Rove resigns, and now Gonzales. The President’s two fiercest defenders have both left the White House, and only two weeks apart. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve been in favor of Gonzales leaving since he first stepped foot in the Attorney General’s office, and electoral strategists like Karl Rove should never serve in government in the first place, but there’s something not right about the Gonzales resigning on the heels of Rove. And I have no idea what it is.

Rove may have left for a variety of reasons, many of them indictment related. First, the folks over at DailyKos suggested Rove’s resignation may have something to do with a corruption case involving the governor of Alabama. OpEdNews, citing dubious “sources say,” asserts that Vice-President Cheney forced Rove out because Cheney was pissed that Scooter Libby (and not Rove) became the fall-guy in the Valerie Plame case.

Of course, not every reason is indictment related. Keith Olberman and his guests suggested that Rove (and President Bush) would “serve the function in the next Presidential campaign of taking the attack to the Democrat.” And it’s impossible to discount the fact that Rove is an electoral wizard, not a policy wonk, and the skills he brings to the table are no longer required by a lame-duck President.

When it comes to Gonzales, there is little doubt about why he resigned. For the past six months, every sane-thinking person has been calling for the Attorney General’s resignation, mostly due to his role in the firing of the U.S. attorneys and/or his probable-perjury about the NSA’s domestic surveillance programs. As many newspapers are reporting, Gonzales’ resignation was the most expected unexpected news of the day.

All of which is to say that the Rove and Gonzales resignations have plenty of real-world reasons for happening. But still, I can’t help but feel, like a tickle in the back of my brain, the beginnings of some sort of conspiracy theory. Both of these people should have resigned long ago, but they didn’t. So why now?