Challies Dot Com Forums?

There is so much discussion happening in various parts of this site now that I keep thinking it might be a good idea to put some forums in place.

I know there is a long and arduous way of changing the commenting system so that the forum takes over that role, and think that might be the way to go. So at the end of each post it would say Comments as it does now, but when you clicked that it would take you into a forum rather than the loooong list of comments as it does now. This would arrange the comments more logically and more neatly than are under the current system and would keep the pages from getting so incredibly long like they are now (see the Purpose Driven Life page for an example)! It certainly would facilitate easier conversation. It would also let other people start discussion topics, which might be interesting.

So what do you think? Good idea or bad?