Start with a fascinating timeline on Richards/Madoff, courtesy of Mrs Panstreppon on TPM and riffing on Zachary Goldfarb's reporting in the Washington Post. Great inside politics revealed.

Smart move by the Obama SEC to force out Richards ahead of the August report. This way, new SEC chief Mary Schapiro's team will have plenty of room to control the agency's response to the report's allegations, instead of having to deal with Richards's own responses.

All that aside — and even leaving aside the fact that Richards was the boss of (and a pal of) Eric Swanson, who married Madoff's niece Shana in September 2007 and then recused herself from the Madoff investigations back then that went nowhere — there are really good reasons for Richards to be leaving. Take a look at Richards's soft-as-mush outlook on her job as an enforcer.

A career SEC official, Richards spoke on "Why Does Fraud Occur and What Can Deter or Prevent it?" at a Fort Worth conference about three months before Madoff revealed his massive Ponzi scheme.

You read the speech, you can see why she's just got to go and why she probably should have left the SEC post long ago. Her focus in the speech was on why people commit fraud. Without mentioning Madoff by name, of course, she talked about "grifters" who commit such frauds as Ponzi schemes. But the tenor of her comments about grifters was ridiculously namby-pamby for someone who's supposed to be an enforcer. Here's an excerpt:

What a softie! Sorry, Richards, an educated consumer is a good thing, but it's not "just as important" as enforcement efforts. Your job was to do the enforcing.

Who knows how much better the SEC will be? But it is interesting to note that new SEC boss Schapiro has already shaken up the agency's enforcement department by bringing on board federal prosecutors — people who are unlikely to be hung up on education and more focused on sniffing out criminal behavior.