Dictionaries with tuples or tuples of tuples

[Jon Reyes]

So I have a dictionary and the key is a number. The values are either a single tuple or a tuple of tuples. Is there a better way to go about accessing the values of the dictionary? All the tuples contain four elements.

So say:
col = {"1": (0,1,2,3): "2": ((0,1,2,3),(2,3,4,5))}

Then to access the values of the tuple I'd do this:

for key,value in col.iteritems():
    if isinstance(value[0], tuple):
        #iterate through the tuples of a tuple
    else:
        #iterate through the tuple

At first I was thinking that I could just put the same keys with just single tuples on a dictionary but only one tuple exists when I iterate through the dictionary. I'm sorry, I'm really new at Python and I just grab anything I can when I need it from Google and the Python docs.