Three weeks after Deborah Jeane Palfrey hanged herself following her conviction by a federal jury for running whores in the nation’s capital, the judge has wiped the books clean of the fabled “D.C. Madam.”

“IT IS HEREBY ORDERED that…the jury verdicts are vacated and the indictment in this matter is dismissed,” U.S. District Judge James Robertson said in a written order today.

Palfrey’s sad end in a tiny shed outside her mom’s trailer in Florida capped an extraordinarily bizarre narrative involving a lady who ascended -though maybe migrated is a better word – from working class to working girls.

Palfrey was always unfailingly polite to The Mouth. She often thanked us for exposing the surreal fantasy life of one of her escorts, Paula Neble, despite ad nauseum explanations that our expose of the fake Ph.D. researcher-turned-hooker wasn’t done as a favor to the defendant. Palfrey had sued Neble, a government witness, for breach of contract and her story was just a tasty subplot to the madam’s saga.

The truly cruel joke was on Debbie Palfrey in the end.

The Pamela Martin & Associates escort service Palfrey happily touted in interviews as “high-priced” after her indictment turned out to be a pretty low rent operation when details emerged at trial this year. She had promised to topple johns at the highest levels of official Washington. But 13 years’ of phone toll records revealed only a State Department appointee, a Louisiana senator and the guy who coined the term “shock and awe.”

The sex scandal involving ex-New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer demonstrated that Palfrey’s $150 an hour sexual services hardly compared to the $1,000 to $5,000 an hour charged by Emperors Club VIP. After Spitzer imploded in March, The Mouth asked Palfrey why anyone would pay so much for sex.

“Why does anyone overpay for anything in the marketplace? Excellent promotion and superb marketing,” Palfrey wrote in her last e-mail to us. “Emperors Club VIP was a very good marketer, from what I have ascertained.”