Between us was a row of large white lever-arch files. Up the spine of each was the word "PISASALE" in capital letters.

"I asked for those to be sent up to me," Dr Levy explained at the time, after noting my interest. He had wanted "to take another look", he said.

Officially, the CCC had just cleared then-Ipswich mayor Paul Pisasale of any serious wrongdoing after a series of allegations relating to his use of private campaign funding entities including Forward Ipswich.

It had followed stories that Mr Pisasale had channelled the proceeds of a charity golf day into one of his campaign funds. The CCC investigation into more than a dozen allegations had taken the best part of a year. At the end, apart from a couple of minor reporting infractions, councillor Pisasale was, as the irrepressible mayor himself said on hearing the news, "all good".

"They've investigated my whole life and I've got the tick," Mr Pisasale told me at the time.

Dr Levy hadn't been happy with the outcome and didn't mind me knowing, confiding that he wasn't sure that the junior officers who had run the investigation had the requisite financial and analytical skills.

"You know I'm an accountant as well as a barrister, don't you?" he said.

Dr Levy later penned a report to Parliament calling for greater transparency in donations disclosures. Some of its recommendations have since been acted upon. But despite leaving the door open to a further look at Mr Pisasale's affairs, the CCC has never taken action against the former Ipswich mayor.

Mr Pisasale subsequently increased his share of the popular vote in the 2016 local elections to a blistering 83 per cent, making him arguably one of the most popular Australian politicians ever.

The episode with Dr Levy was emblematic of a long-running saga in Queensland political life, in which career bureaucrats, lawyers, journalists and investigators repeatedly grasp at Paul John Pisasale - long-term councillor, businessman, pro-business life member of the Labor Party and all-round larrikin ??- and each time come up empty-handed.

And it seems only to have enhanced Mr Pisasale's standing in his local community.

Allegations of conflicts of interest and mixing business with politics have been levelled at Mr Pisasale since he was a lowly councillor in the 1990s.

He was thrust into the national spotlight in 2014 when it emerged he had received a $7500 campaign donation from Australian Water Holdings, a company linked to jailed former NSW minister Eddie Obeid. A famous photo emerged showing Mr Pisasale with shortly-to-be-embarrassed NSW premier Barry O'Farrell and Obeid associate Nick Di Girolamo.

And the allegations didn't stop in mid-2015. It then emerged Mr Pisasale had procured a council job for his wife. Internal council emails showed he had asked the then-chief executive of the council, Carl Wulff, how this could be achieved.

Mr Wulff, by then chief executive of the troubled Liverpool Council in NSW, jumped to Mr Pisasale's defence, backing his claim that it had been Mr Wulff's idea to hire Mrs Pisasale.

Then it was revealed that Mr Pisasale had lobbied then-LNP premier Campbell Newman in 2013 on behalf of one of the mayor's campaign donors, Japanese developer Sekisui, over a development proposal at Coolum on the Sunshine Coast - 160 kilometres from Ipswich.

It provoked a furious response from residents of Coolum and others who object to the scheme, prompting a banner headline in the Sunshine Coast Daily newspaper: "Piss Off Pisasale".

Just prior to March 2016 the Queensland Local Government department investigated Mr Pisasale's failure to declare some share ownerships. He was eventually fined a few thousand dollars.

A consistent theme of allegations against Mr Pisasale has been that he is too close to developers, some of whom have colourful backgrounds.

He has always explained these ties by saying he only has the best interests of Ipswich at heart.

His popularity with such businesses, targeting the fast-growing city of Ipswich and the former farmland on its outskirts for housing, meant the mayor has never had any trouble raising campaign finance, easily finding the $200,000 or so needed to fund each of his four tilts at mayor.

One close associate involved in fundraising for Mr Pisasale said that in recent years it had become almost an embarrassment, given his enduring popularity meant the money wasn't really needed.

Rather than eat away at Mr Pisasale's credibility, popularity or electoral prospects, the persistent drip, drip of allegations appears to have had exactly the opposite effect on Ipswich residents and voters, attracted to the larrikin known from Brisbane to Tokyo as "Mr Ipswich".

Mr Pisasale increasingly embraced his victim status, further emboldened each time he eluded controversy. At the 2016 local elections he was using the "clean bill of health" from the CCC, as he called it, on the hustings to win votes.

By the time of last month's public hearings at the CCC into allegations of electoral funding irregularities he was playing the part with gusto. He defended "the poor old developer" who, he argued, had to be called upon to fund political campaigns because of a lack of public funding.

But his resignation on Tuesday, in which he cited ill-health but coming amid a fresh CCC investigation and a raid on his office, shows that every show, no matter how popular, must eventually come to an end.