I always used to tell my cadets, you know, all the time...sometimes it’s harder to be a slob than to be neat and tidy and clean.
The famously improvised conversation between Lt Columbo and Col Rumford, which builds up to Rumford's confession not of his factual guilt, but of an impossible dream of innocence ("I got roses...white roses"), is a remarkable study in the dismantling of that very fantasy, and the deconstruction of a personality fatally dependent on control: of his external environment as much as his own innermost anxieties.
In the privacy of his office, with only the Lieutenant for an audience - whose companionship he is actively seeking, even beyond the common bond of professional ethics ("I suppose you could call that a uniform") - the Colonel's sense of security is satisfied. For one brief, albeit crucial, moment his insecurities are exposed, and what would have been a stern lecture in the ears of his cadets, on manly discipline, and the "ease" of being neat and tidy and clean, becomes instead a poignant admission of personal inadequacy.
It is not the apparent lack of discipline among the student population that will precipitate Rumford's demise - illegal cider fermentation and off-campus relationships notwithstanding: the Colonel's costliest battle is the one he is fighting against himself, against his own inability to live without the rules and regulations that define his existence. It remains for Rumford to reach the final conclusion: that he has already lost that existential battle.
