On April 30, less than a week away now, Chrysler is supposed to submit to the Treasury Department it’s grand plan to ally with Italian car maker Fiat. This action is judged by almost everyone (certainly by the Treasury) as the last-ditch hope of Chrysler to pull its ass out of the fire and back into the frying pan. After receiving $4 Billion in guaranteed loans so far, they stand to get another $6 Billion if they can successfully restructure their costs by entering into a deal with Fiat. If.

If you posted the odds on this plan in Vegas, it would certainly qualify as a long shot. This is not a marriage made in heaven, as these two auto companies really have very little in common and nothing to really offer each other. Fiat is probably looking at the failed marriage between Chrysler and Daimler from a few years back. Even 100+ year-old giant Daimler couldn’t make a horse race of it with Chrysler. They even had their goofy chairman Dieter Zetsche personally shilling for Chrysler in their tongue-in-cheek television ads.

But in the end German practicality dictated the ultimate outcome, and Daimler unloaded Chrysler. And there’s no reason to believe that Chrysler and Fiat will somehow find each other irresistible and end up skipping merrily down the automotive road for the rest of their days. The Treasury Department, with a huge financial and political stake in this whole deal, doesn’t appear to have very much faith in it either. The fact is, Treasury seems to have already decided that Chrysler is going to be a bankrupt company very soon.

They have entered into secret negotiations with the UAW and are willing to protect their pensions and retiree health care benefits if a Chapter 11 filing for Chrysler becomes a reality. They also appear to have been quietly negotiating with Chrysler’s creditors and pressuring them to accept some ridiculously reduced amount for what the car company owes them. The latest offer from the Feds is 22 cents on the dollar and a 5% stake in the new, reorganized company. However, the creditors want 65 cents on the dollar and a 40% stake. Stay tuned.

But there’s more to the story than just saving jobs and pensions and an American automotive icon. The U.S. Government appears to be crash testing a Chrysler bankruptcy to see how it all works. It’s a practice run, a rehearsal if you will, for the much bigger potential bankruptcy of General Motors, when and if that also becomes necessary. They’re out there on the driving range with a bucket of Chrysler balls figuring out how to hit them long and straight, so when they step up to the first tee they can swing at those GM balls with confidence.

It will be interesting to see what kind of crash test results come from all this. Airbags aren’t going to help much in this impact, and survivability in the crush zones will be questionable at best.