The agency that runs the airport refused an apparently serious offer to buy the men’s room stall made famous by Craig’s 2007 conviction for disorderly conduct in a sex-solicitation sting operation by the airport police. The Metropolitan Airport Commission (MAC) spurned the $5,000 offer, which arrived by certified mail, according to MAC spokesperson Patrick Hogan.

“We would not want to do that to the senator,” Hogan told the Spokesman-Review newspaper of Spokane, Wash., which is just over the state line from Craig’s home state of Idaho. “We’d want to treat this case like we do any other, and we don’t sell fixtures for novelty purposes.”

Read more and see those intact fixtures for yourself in a new YouTube video after the jump.

Craig tried to take back his guilty plea, but – unlike issuing a presidential pardon – copping to a misdemeanor is irrevocable. That’s what the state Court of Appeals told Craig when it rejected his appeal earlier this month.

The revelation about the rebuffed purchase offer is part of a story on Hogan’s claim that sight-seers’ “special interest” in the bathroom has dwindled since Craig’s arrest. The men’s room’s status as a tourist attraction ended the gay cruising activity that the MAC police sting had targeted, Hogan said. That in turn allowed MAC officials to reverse their decision to extend stall walls to meet the floor, a project that would have cost several times the amount of the would-be stall-buyer’s offer.

The airport survived a boycott by Craig supporters only to find the MAC in heavy talks with Delta to renegotiate Northwest’s contracts following the airlines’ merger. The publicly owned and operated airport even faces privatization threats in the state legislative session that starts next month. By not remodeling the mens’ room, the airport commission can argue it has saved enough to afford its high-minded refusal to play-for-pay with at least one well-heeled sex-scandal devotee.

Still, Hogan sounded more like an enthusiastic tour guide than the spokesman for a thrifty public agency when he gushed, “The restroom looks exactly as it was when the senator was arrested.”

Here is a video re-enactment of Craig’s visit to the Minnesota airport men’s room, released Monday by satellite radio talk show host Michelangelo Signorile: