Two weeks old and counting, Wisconsin’s scorched-earth budget battle has become a consuming national spectacle and defining political moment, an episode with few parallels in the legislative annals of this or any state.

“It’s really a confluence of a series of extraordinary events,” said Peverill Squire, a University of Missouri professor who studies legislative politics. “This has all been full of terrific story angles nobody could have anticipated.”

Even the most experienced political players are having trouble seeing an endgame.

“Everybody’s playing chicken,” said Madison pollster Paul Maslin, a Democrat. “I’m pretty close to saying this is maybe a no-win for everybody.”

What started as one state’s budget dispute has become a much bigger melodrama, test case and proxy war, spawning fundraising and advertising campaigns, mobilizing labor and the left on a national scale and transforming a longtime but low-profile conservative cause (reducing the power of public employee unions) into a hot-button issue that could influence the 2012 Republican nominating fight and shape the future of organized labor.

“This is a battle that Republicans and tea party types, conservatives, have been waiting for frankly for some time,” said Steve King, a member of the national GOP’s executive committee from Wisconsin. “And Scott Walker … he chose to go first.”

It’s a conflict that said a lot about its time and place.