This might come as a shock; you had better sit down. An internal review released on Friday revealed that the federal government did not properly vet the contactors it hired to develop the web portal that would service customers shopping on the Affordable Care Act’s health insurance exchange.

Of course, the disastrous debut of HealthCare.gov led every rational person to reach this same conclusion months ago, but it’s now official.

“One of the reports showed that CGI Federal, a key contractor in the development of the site, had ties to failed projects, while an earlier story revealed that the company was filled with executives from a troubled IT firm,” The Washington Post reported.

Well, let’s hope the Internal Revenue Service did a better job of vetting CGI Federal than the Department of Health and Human Services, because this scandal-prone contractor is back on the job.

“Seven months after federal officials fired CGI Federal for its botched work on the Obamacare website Healthcare.gov, the IRS awarded the same company a $4.5 million IT contract for its new Obamacare tax program,” The Daily Caller’s Richard Pollock reported.

GI is a $10.5 billion Montreal-based company that has forever been etched into the public’s mind as the company behind the bungled Obamacare main website.

After facing a year of embarrassing failures, federal officials finally pulled the plug on the company and terminated CGI’s contract in January 2014.

Yet on Aug. 11, seven months later, IRS officials signed a new contract with CGI to provide “critical functions” and “management support” for its Obamacare tax program, according to the Federal Procurement Data System, a federal government procurement database.

Not only has CGI Federal been contracted to build a new functional platform for the federal government, but it is also back to working on an account linked to the implementation of the Affordable Care Act. A fiction writer would be hard-pressed to come up with a better metaphor for the federal government’s chronic inefficiencies and cronyism.

In just the last 24 hours, we have seen the president of the United States sit down for a hard-hitting interview with a woman who bathes in cereal milk and sticks condoms in her nose on camera, and she managed to probe the president on a global security threat that has otherwise been overlooked by the mainstream press. We have seen the State Department ask Disney if they could license the movie Frozen in order to educate the public on the issue of global warming. This propagandistic approach hasn’t disturbed anyone in the serious set. And, of course, Sarah Palin has intimated that she is prepared to run for president, an assertion being taken at face value despite the fact that she is clearly and flagrantly not serious.

We are in an age of inanities.