ALL OF THE ESSENTIAL DYNAMICS of Diana DiZoglio’s insurgent campaign to dig into the doings of the Massachusetts Legislature were captured in miniature over the course of a single day in March.

Following months of an increasingly bitter feud with DiZoglio, Attorney General Andrea Campbell used a live radio interview to signal a new willingness to find a path forward on the long-stalled legislative audit. What looked like an olive branch, however, was met with a blistering reply from DiZoglio, who accused the state’s top law enforcement officer of violating professional ethics standards by simply calling her cell phone.

The bizarre series of events marked the latest turn in the long-running saga, which started with DiZoglio’s campaign promise to audit the Legislature and got more complicated when lawmakers resisted her efforts to follow through on a voter-approved ballot question granting her that authority. The twists and turns can appear inscrutable to anyone without a JD or an addiction to Massachusetts political melodrama. But now, after DiZoglio slammed the door on a potential compromise, it will be up to the state’s ultimate legal arbiters to sort things out.

The Supreme Judicial Court will hear oral arguments next month in a lawsuit DiZoglio filed against House and Senate leaders over their refusal to participate in her audit, a case that quickly morphed into a legal debate about whether she even had the authority to sue without buy-in from Campbell’s office.

Justices will be asked to settle questions about DiZoglio’s legal standing to bring the suit. It’s less clear if they will also wade into the underlying constitutional debate over her office’s ability to probe the workings of another branch of government.

Among lawmakers, views break down along partisan lines. Democrats insist that any audit by DiZoglio — a Democrat who previously served in both the House and Senate, but clashed with her party’s leaders in both chambers in the process — would cross red lines delineating the separation of powers between the legislative and executive branches. Badly outnumbered Republicans support of her effort, either out of a sincere belief in the value of the proposed oversight or as a way to needle the Democratic supermajority, or a bit of both.

As the May 6 court date approaches, the crusading auditor gained at least one Democratic ally under the Golden Dome: Rep. Alan Silvia of Fall River.

Breaking with the position held by his party’s leadership, Silvia filed an amicus brief last week arguing that DiZoglio is indeed permitted to probe the Legislature, and that Campbell is overstepping her own powers as attorney general by slowing a lawsuit. Statute gives the auditor “broad authority” to examine state entities, Silvia wrote, and the 2024 voter-approved law expanded the scope to include the Legislature. The former Fall River police officer, a moderate who sometimes votes against Democratic leadership, called on the court “not to revisit the policy wisdom of that enactment, but to give it effect.”

Campbell’s decision not to appoint a special assistant attorney general for DiZoglio and to ask the court to toss her complaint, Silvia wrote, “creates a self-reinforcing barrier that effectively extinguishes the Auditor’s ability to act.”

Last year, along with nearly every other Democrat, Silvia voted against Republican-led efforts to force movement on the audit issue, either by writing compliance with the voter law into internal rules or by asking the state’s high court to review constitutional concerns.

“Many, many months have passed, and there’s nothing resolved,” Silva told CommonWealth Beacon in explaining his change in outlook. “The obstruction continues, and my constituents continually ask me, ‘Where’s the audit?’ I can no longer sit back and kick this can down the road. When we keep talking about transparency and accountability, we’re not being very good role models.”

The conflict ostensibly is centered on DiZoglio’s prized policy priority: following through on her promise to audit the Legislature, offered first as a campaign pledge in 2022 and then buoyed by resounding voter approval of a 2024 ballot question she championed that gave her office power to do so. Her efforts have been stymied by legislative leaders, who maintain that the audit would violate constitutional separation of powers principles.

DiZoglio wants to challenge that in court, but Campbell, whose office represents state officeholders in litigation, has balked at taking on the case until DiZoglio spells out more clearly what she wants to audit. Campbell, who says she voted for the audit ballot question, maintains there are constitutional limits to what DiZoglio could examine in an audit of the Legislature.

Frustrated by that response, DiZoglio sought to circumvent Campbell by suing House and Senate leaders directly, and asking to bring on Shannon Liss-Riordan — whom Campbell defeated in the 2022 Democratic primary for attorney general — as her attorney in the matter.

Their disagreement has brought the issue to a standstill, and in late March, their relationship crashed to a new low.

In Campbell’s telling, which she recounted during a live interview on a GBH radio show, DiZoglio had begun saying publicly that she simply wanted to examine the House and Senate’s finances and perhaps some state contracts as well, seemingly a far narrower scope than the wide-reaching topics the auditor once targeted. Campbell said that idea was more within the legal bounds of the auditor’s authority, and so she now saw a way to make the audit happen.

She gave her counterpart a call on her cell phone to communicate that “there is a pathway forward,” Campbell said. DiZoglio did not answer.

Instead, just hours after Campbell shared the story on the radio, DiZoglio fired off a press release not only rejecting the attorney general’s assessment of an opportunity to get to yes, but also accusing Campbell of violating professional attorney standards. Because DiZoglio is seeking to have her own lawyer pursue the case, Campbell’s phone call to her ran afoul of a state rule that bars lawyers from directly contacting another party in a case, the auditor contended.

DiZoglio dumped into public a lengthy email exchange between her staff and Campbell’s staff, offering an unusual glimpse into the inner workings of the rift. At one point, a top Campbell aide criticized DiZoglio over the perception that the auditor is more interested in a public clash than in any compromise.

“For many months now, we have been under the impression that the Office of the State Auditor would rather fight – in public or in court – than provide serious answers about the case that you would like to bring,” assistant attorney general Pat Moore wrote to DiZoglio’s team.

In the course of the blowup, DiZoglio made clear she thinks all roads forward lead through the courts, not any conversation between her and the attorney general. Leaving no uncertainty about that, she vowed in the very last line of her press release that Campbell will not have “the privilege of speaking with me privately or alone – ever again.”