I guess maybe someone is planning to fork MON to lyra2re, or maybe they just plan to keep merge mining with Murray or execoin.
There's a lyra2re branch on
github.. and its live on testnet. So if you want to test out merge mining with vertcoin (on testnet) you can. If the vertcoin guys manage to get consensus on their hardfork it can be merged (unless someone found issues during testing etc).