House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced Friday that she’ll send the articles of impeachment over to the Senate next week, finally ending her always-absurd effort to leverage Majority Leader Mitch McConnell into adopting her preferred rules for President Trump’s trial. Really, what was the point?

Forcing the speaker’s hands, a growing number of Senate Democrats had publicly called on her to move the ball along, with more sure to join if the stall continued. But this was inevitable from the start of her gambit, unless some miracle utterly transformed the politics of impeachment.

For centuries, the House and Senate have insisted on setting their own internal rules — including when it comes to impeachments. And McConnell was always adamant that he was going to adopt the same rules the Senate passed unanimously to try President Bill Clinton in 1998, and he always had the votes to make that stick.

Plus, Pelosi and her lieutenants justified the House’s heavy-handed, hyperpartisan rush to vote out its impeachment articles by claiming that Trump posed an imminent threat — there was no time to compel all witnesses to testify, or to let Republicans call all the witnesses they wanted, because (she said) it would give the president more time to somehow corrupt the 2020 elections.

No time, that is, until she decided to wait in a bid to make the Senate adopt her rules.

Yet now the articles are headed to the Senate anyway, four weeks later but otherwise the same as if the speaker had moved the ball before leaving for recess.

The Beltway press routinely praises Pelosi as a great strategist, but this ridiculous delay looks like the best tactic she could come up with was a Hail Mary delay-of-game.