Again, I'm not going to draw any conclusions about Governor Christie, but no one needs to in order to tell that this is a "gate."
Indeed, even if the Governor really didn't know anything at all (which I find hard to believe), this is still a matter of inconveniencing the public in order to get back at an insignificant New Jersey politician, the Mayor of a town populated by 35 thousand people. Personally, of all the ways I can think of to be inconvenienced, being stuck in heavy traffic ranks as among the most unpleasant. The last person I know of who orchestrated a monumental traffic jam was Mancow Muller, the shock jock who stopped his van on the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge to get a haircut a short time after President Clinton held up air traffic by getting a haircut in Air Force 1 before take off. Fortunately, I was not on the Bay Bridge that day. If I had been, I think I would have gone to the radio station where he worked and strangled him.
However, the traffic jam on the George Washington Bridge wasn't orchestrated by a shock jock playing a tasteless practical joke on the public. This tasteless practical joke on the public was orchestrated by people working in the office of the Governor of New Jersey. In other words, it was orchestrated by the very people who are among the most responsible for making sure that there are no unnecessary traffic jams on the George Washington Bridge. They kept it up for four days. Children were late for school and emergency vehicles were delayed. You don't want to delay an ambulance with a critically ill person on a stretcher in the back. Minutes count.
The grandfather of all the "gates" was Watergate. In that case, too, the law was violated by people working in the office of the chief executive, who is supposed to enforce the law, not break it. In that case, the chief executive was not a state governor but the President of the United States. Also in that case, the idea behind the criminal act was to get the goods on the opposition in an election that President Nixon won almost as easily as Governor Christie won re-election last November. The exercise in political retribution was utterly pointless in both cases. Technically, the victim of the crime was Lawrence O'Brien, once Postmaster General, at the time National Democratic Party chairman and later Commissioner of the NBA. The distinguished television journalist Howard K. Smith give an editorial at the end of the ABC evening news one night ridiculing the very idea of burglarizing Mr. O'Brien's office. Calling O'Brien "the most artlessly candid man in Washington," Smith said, "If you want to know what Larry O'Brien is doing, you don't have to burglarize his office; you just have to ask him."
Therefore, it is reasonable to call this scandal a "gate". Like the original gate, it involves a betrayal of public trust by the very people charged with protecting the public, it involves a chief executive and it is proper now as it was then to find find out to what extent he is involved as well as who really is and who is not. In neither case did the crime have any practical value to anyone. It is only going to get some people more trouble than it is worth.
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