Ill advised blundering = nasty mess

[Harry Putnam <harry.put3@gmail.com>]

NOTE:  Already posted on unbuntu list... but due to it being something
of an urgent matter... and not seeing responses there... I'm posting
here too since the tools are all debian tools.
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Due to unbridled personal bungling, I've created a nasty mess while
installing sendmail.

I inadvertantly deleted /etc/init.d/sendmail.  Well I thought I'd just
reinstall sendmail to re-acquire that file.

So uninstalled sendmail... with aptitude but it uninstalled a few
other parts of the tools too.

There appear to be several packages involved.
p   sendmail
i   sendmail-base
C   sendmail-bin
i   sendmail-cf       

As you see, after several attempts at uninstall/reinstall, I now have
some installed and some not.  The rub comes with sendmail-bin which is
the package that contains /etc/init.d/sendmail

Any attempt to uninstall it tells me it is not installed, any attempt
to install it ends with an error that appears to happen due to that
missing file, or the fact that sendmail-bin cannot be --configured.

I've tried any number of ways to sneak up on it, but aptitude won't
let me.  Or more accurately, I don't know how to use aptitude well
enough to resolve the problem.

I tried apt-get with the --force-yes flag, in the hopes of forcing the
install but it didn't work... showed the same dpkg error.

,----
| [...]
| /etc/mail/aliases: 4 aliases, longest 10 bytes, 66 bytes total
| invoke-rc.d: unknown initscript, /etc/init.d/sendmail not found.
| dpkg: error processing sendmail-bin (--configure):
| 
|  subprocess installed post-installation script returned error exit
|  status 100
| 
| Errors were encountered while processing:
|  sendmail-bin
| E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)
`----

So, can anyone recommend some method to get past this, and get the
pkgs fully installed and configured?