Seth Carey is out. Seth Carey is back.

Pardon our confusion, but despite protestations to the contrary, it appears little has changed about the campaign for an Oxford County casino over the past months.

The public is still promised a plan, a site, an investment groupin short, all of the tangible details for evaluating the casino’s merits for existence. As of this writing, the referendum is now a scant five months away.

There were already plenty of questions to answer about this proposal – it’s viability being the largest. But now, with the leadership soft-shoe being danced by the campaign, a larger question has emerged:

Whose casino is it?

Until his resignation in May, the answer was invariably Carey. The idealistic attorney had written the enabling casino legislation, sought petition signatures, politicked ceaselessly for the idea, and bankrolled the entire campaign.

But Carey’s alleged professional indiscretions caused his departure. In his stead, the Oxford casino campaign’s spokesperson, Pat LaMarche, has described high-stakes negotiations with veiled investors seeking to assume control of the initiative.

She has promised a bombshell – soon.

Yet, just as this latter group is apparently coalescing, Carey comes back, lobbying his hometown government to support the casino, and planning a barnstorming tour in rolling casino advertisement powered by a biodiesel engine.

“I will see it to the end,” Carey told the Sun Journal.

We’ve never doubted it. Yet this obvious admission sets the stage for a delicate public discussion, when the details of this casino and its backers are finally revealed: Carey vs. the investors as the project’s visionary.

Carey has spun a grassroots tale about this casino, and sold it on promises of public and economic revitalization for Oxford County. His legislation gives 39 percent of the casino profits to worthy causes, once the four-season outdoor gambling resort opens its doors.

Investors will undoubtedly have different ideas about this project, out-of-line with Carey’s well-hewn idealistic imagery. Unless, of course, they agree with Evergreen whole-hogin which case, we’d know who they are, already.

Maine voters are primed to consider Carey’s casino: an environmentally friendly facility catering to the community and that tourist traffic that wends its way to Sugarloaf and Sunday River. It was already a big idea to swallow.

And voters aren’t buying it. A recent poll by PanAtlanticSMS Group of Portland showed Maine residents are against the Oxford casino, 46 percent to 29 percent.

What would be worse, however, is this forthcoming investment group – whoever it is – switching gears on the casino with just months to spare before the election. Yet that is the course this casino appears to be charting.

It’s imperative to know exactly whose casino is on November’s ballot: Carey’s, or the investors’ to be named?

But just like everything else about it, we’re still waiting to find out.