We all knew the decision had been made long ago and this was just a cosmetic game we were being asked to play.
And so it proved.
Anyone with a grain of common sense could see that closing Chalkstone Post Office made no sense against any criteria you could come up with.
These foregone conclusion consultation exercises are becoming the norm nowadays, particularly from large organisations like utilities.
As members of the public they give us a bit of a problem and, despite the apparent incongruity of the comparison, it is a similar dilemma to that faced by politicians in Zimbabwe.
Of course, the cost and the danger involved in the Zimbabwean election are in a different world from a minor struggle over facilities in west Suffolk, and some people might feel it is in poor taste to draw any parallels.
But the fundamental premise is similar.
Is there any point in taking part in a process which pretends to be democratic and yet has no intention of being anything of the kind?
Like Morgan Tsvangirai, we are damned if we do and damned if we don't.
He decided the potential cost in human lives was too great to carry on, even though pulling out allows Mugabe to portray him as someone who knew he would lose so ran away.
Had he gone ahead and, through the violence and terror of the Mugabe regime, lost the election, he would only have succeeded in giving a certain credibility to the dictator anyway.
In our small way, if we take part in these consultation exercises, we have no chance of affecting anything and we give credibility to the organisation which is holding them.
If we don't, they can say they consulted people but no one was interested enough to reply.
Just as the election in Zimbabwe was not intended to find out what the people wanted, but to keep Mugabe in power behind this figleaf of legitimacy, so the consultation exercise is designed to achieve a result which has already been decided.
All one can hope is that those who make these sort of barmy decisions soon become the subject of a consultation exercise with regard to the future of their jobs, which are almost certainly completely unnecessary, and the costs of which are usually one of the reasons why the organisation has decided it needs to cut back on services in the first place.
I see this week that Chalkstone is to be hit by a double whammy with the removal of its phone box.
Someone has decided that phone boxes are no longer necessary in the era of mobile phones.
They assume everyone has one and everyone can use one and would probably be astonished to discover this is not true at all.
Completely cut off from the real world by their amazing modern technology, they have crunched some numbers and come out with another ludicrous answer.
Rather like Robert Mugabe they have no doubt their answer is the right one so it needs to be implemeneted immediately.
Unfortunately for them, the perception nowadays is that the people affected by policies need to have a say from time to time.
So another figleaf of a consultation exercise will be dreamt up and another group of people will be faced with the decision of whether to boycott the whole thing or give credibility to the dictator.
And they will never know who they wrote to, or that their letters were placed in a large round file marked 'Waste Paper Bin'.
God may be able to remove Mugabe but, when it comes to the Post Office, BT and all the other utilities, He'd have to find the little weasels first.