Plato's Socrates

i'm pretty sceptical about this. i think that from day one, plato was using socrates for his own philosophical purposes. There's not much use in trying to extricate a portrait of the historical socrates from some supposedly reliable socratic dialogues. Besides, why should we try to do this anyway, when the platonic socrates is so interesting? We can watch as plato develops socrates as a character in dialogue after dialogue,. confronting him with various other characters, many of them also based on real people like generals, poets, sophists, young lovers, scoundrels and politicians.