Sometimes, a governor just has to deliver, and John Baldacci failed to do so Tuesday.

We’ve had 10 months of almost unimaginable computer chaos in Maine’s Department of Health and Human Services. We still have medical providers awaiting payment for services delivered in January. We have others receiving lump payments without any idea which services they are being paid for and providers receiving large checks they aren’t even owed.

Wednesday, the governor summoned reporters for an update. Instead, after 10 months of madness, the governor announced that he had created a study group and hired a consulting company to look more deeply.

“State health officials joined the governor in laying out the effort to transform the new Office of MaineCare Services ensuring that it operates as a high-performing organization that is efficient and accountable to customer needs, is fiscally responsible, living within its financial resources, and is sustainable in the face of federal program changes and federal funding cuts,” said an official press release.

We know high-sounding gobbledygook when we hear it, and that’s it.

“I recently brought on board an experienced company,” the governor said in the news release, “Deloitte Consulting, to ensure that the best and brightest were working to correct this serious problem. Unfortunately, their work has uncovered greater system deficiencies and insufficient business systems …”

We’re glad the “best and brightest” are now on the case, but who’s been heading this up so far, the dim and feeble?

And this is no trifling issue. We’re talking about the medical services provided not only by physicians and hospitals, but the people who care for the state’s mentally ill, mentally retarded, disabled, foster children and the elderly in nursing homes. Millions of dollars are at stake.

When we first wrote about this in February, the state was in its fourth week of not paying Medicaid bills. At the time, DHHS said it could be weeks before the complicated system was working properly.

If only.

In March, the governor got tough and ordered DHHS to make “reliable and predictable” payments within 30 days to all 7,000 agency providers.

Didn’t happen.

By May, the system was still fouled up. “Medicaid computer snafu far from fixed,” said a Sun Journal headline. “There will be no quick fix,” said one state official.

Indeed.

It’s now July, and the governor and DHHS are still woefully short on specifics. How could such a monumental bungle have occurred? Who has been held accountable? Why weren’t real experts brought in long before now?

Yes, the state is now paying some back bills. Yet, as a local physician told the Sun Journal, payments are often inaccurate, hours of extra time are required to link payments to individual cases, and the state is actually refusing to take back overpayments.

Bear in mind that all this comes as the state launches a complex, one-of-a-kind insurance program designed to provide coverage to thousands of the state’s uninsured.

Forgive us for questioning whether DHHS is capable of launching such a program when it has now admitted to “system deficiencies and insufficient business systems” and is in the midst of a “redesign.”

We now wonder, will Dirigo be the next boondoggle?