For the moment, let’s say we’re not buying the official, nothing-to-see-here story the White House is dishing about the gaping hole being ripped into the lawn outside the Oval Office.

Let’s say we suspect the construction crews that have been dipping their backhoes into the most secure soil in the free world are doing something more complex than mere utility work.

The feds may claim that it’s just “upgrades and replacement of utility infrastructure” of a size and complexity that require the excavation of a hole so big it could easily fit the entire Cabinet — and maybe some members of Congress, too. But they’re somewhat vague as to the specifics. And so we wonder.

It’s a bunker, right? It’s gotta be a bunker.

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Make that another bunker. There’s already the underground Situation Room, which was renovated and expanded to 5,000 square feet in 2007, and the nuclear bomb shelter below the East Wing, where Vice President Richard B. Cheney was taken on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001. And who knows what else sits beneath the White House? A tunnel to the State Department? A secret passage to the Treasury?

In 2002, neighbors near the Naval Observatory started complaining about daily construction blasts so loud they rattled windows and knocked mirrors off walls. What, the neighbors demanded to know, was going on at the vice president’s residence?

The answer they got was circumspect.

“Due to its sensitive nature in support of national security and homeland defense, project-specific information is classified and cannot be released,” the then-superintendent of the observatory wrote to the neighborhood advisory commissioner.

Officially, the Navy continued to maintain that the project comprised “infrastructure and utility upgrades.”

Utility upgrades. That sounds familiar.

The White House’s utility upgrade project began in May 2009, according to the General Services Administration. Crews are replacing aging electrical, cooling, heating and fire alarm equipment, a spokesman said.

But those who work in the White House aren’t buying it, either. One told the New York Times that the work is “security-related” and would ultimately create an expanded underground emergency operations center.

Whatever they’re doing outside the West Wing, the crews eventually will shift over to the north lawn by the East Wing and start digging there as well, the GSA says.

“Once the work nears completion, the grounds will be restored to their original state,” according to the GSA spokesman.

In other words, it will be as if nothing happened.

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