What does the Letelier-Gal'tsov metric describe?

Recently the structure of the Letelier-Gal'tsov spacetime has become a matter of some controversy. I show that the metric proposed in \cite{letgal} is defined only on a dense subset of the whole manifold. In the case when it can be defined on the remainder by continuity, the resulting spacetime corresponds to a system of parallel cosmic strings at rest w.r.t. each other.Comment: 4pages, 1 figure. v2 A few words are changed in accordance with the published versio