As of Wednesday morning, the full magnitude of the Foleygate scandal has yet to become clear. The first post-Foley polls don’t look good for Republicans. And Capitol Hill denizens are still bracing for whatever other lurid and scandalous news might be shaken free by the Foley revelations. Any clear evidence that members of the GOP House leadership knew in advance of the more incendiary and explicit Foley IMs would probably yield their immediate resignations. But if nothing else comes out, Hastert, Boehner and company might just make it to Election Day with their hold on their jobs intact.

But focusing on what else may come out on Foleygate may miss the scandal’s most debilitating result for House Republicans.

The simple fact is that Foley’s downfall has pretty nearly decapitated the leadership of the House GOP with just five weeks to go before Election Day.

And that’s devastating.

What do I mean by decapitated?

Let’s assume, for the sake of discussion, that nothing else really comes out about how the House leadership handled this. No more shoes drop. No more members implicated in wrongdoing or leaders implicated in a cover-up. Not a safe assumption from what seems to be in the reporting pipeline. But let’s assume it.

Rep. Thomas Reynolds (R-N.Y.) is in a tight race for reelection and he’s chairman of the NRCC, the Republican House campaign committee. He’s in charge of the effort to keep the majority.

What’s the number-one thing on his mind right now? I doubt it’s the NRCC. I’m not even sure it’s his own race for reelection. At the moment I think Reynolds is, to put it mildly, distracted.

As of Wednesday morning, as contradictions arose between Reynolds’s and his chief of staff’s account of how they counseled Foley during the scandal’s first hours, there was even a chance that Reynolds could become a political casualty of Foleygate before election day.

How about House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) and Majority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio)? I don’t see them going on many shows or making many public appearances for a while. All that will get them is awkward and possibly unanswerable questions about Foleygate.

Pretty much any campaign joust or jab at the Democrats from Boehner or Hastert, on whatever issue, will be instantly transformed into some sex-with-pages snark. “How can we trust them to protect America when they can’t even protect the summer interns on Capitol Hill?”

I predict some fundraisers with these two worthies are going to get canceled too.

Hastert’s Monday press conference was an exercise in awkwardness or schadenfreude (depending on your party affiliation). And I doubt he’ll be giving many more. The Speaker may have bragged to Rush Limbaugh that he would be campaigning in 30 Republican districts this month. But my money says that’s just whistling past the political grave. I’ll believe it when I see it.

Right now Denny Hastert’s priority campaign is the race to hold the speakership, not the House GOP majority.

Add to this the fact that in the final weeks before an election it’s critical for each side’s leaders to work together seamlessly. And what do you think the Hastert-Reynolds relationship is like at the moment? Or how about Boehner and Hastert? They still trust each other?

The one thing a pol can’t brook is being the object of ridicule and derision. And at the moment that’s about the best these two can hope for.

And what happens when Joe Sestak, Rep. Curt Weldon’s Democratic opponent in Pennsylvania, asks Weldon whether he’s lost confidence in Denny Hastert? How does that conversation go?

The simple fact is that to the extent campaigning determines the outcomes of elections, the race goes to the side that can remain on the offensive most consistently and define the national debate on its own terms. Foleygate has made it very hard for the leaders of the House GOP to go on the offensive on anything relevant to the election.

For political purposes they’re basically out of commission. And they’ve given Democratic challengers in every district around the country a slew of questions with which to pummel GOP incumbents or any Republican, for that matter, who puts his head up on television.

This is in the context of an election that was already going very badly for House Republicans. Foleygate has now made them all but politically defenseless in the final stretch of the campaign. And that is a very big deal.

Marshall is editor of talkingpointsmemo.com.

His column appears in The Hill each week.

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