I need a zombie slayer

I forgot to mention... my deadline moved again.

Yeah. I posted that thing about deadlines two days before the new deadline. Well, that deadline is now old, as in obsolete.

This past Friday, I was informed that we had a new deadline: Dec. 3. Why? Because some unnamed person on my "team" had deliberately misrepresented his or her progress, and some of the unfinished material was urgent enough that we (just the writing group, not the entire project) have to keep pluggin' away until some particular very important task (I don't know which one) gets finished by the unnamed person. Which means that I need to continue helping the other writers complete their non-urgent odds and ends too. Why? Because we can't justify extending the deadline for just one person; therefore we all have to keep busy.

The project and team are both big enough that I really don't have any way to identify the miscreant or the unfinished task. I take it this person isn't being fired right now only because my ultra-nice boss's boss wants to give this person a chance to learn a lesson and redeem hirself.

I'm told there were two waves of layoffs before I was hired; I can tell that a lot of incompetence was involved in the creation of the material I'm now responsible for and I've been assured that the person(s) involved are no longer with the company. In light of that, I can understand the management's reluctance to can someone now, but if someone is still laying a big fat goose egg on company time and lying about it, my morale would not at all be hurt by this person's dismissal.

Meanwhile, I don't like this thing where a deadline gets up and moves. It's supposed to be DEAD. That's why we call it a deadline.

So, my question is: how do you kill a zombie? Thank you for your time.