“It’s not the crime, it’s the cover-up.” That may turn out to be the most overused media cliché of the year. Like so many other morsels of media wit and wisdom it is clever, memorable, worldly-wise and wrong—at best a half-truth. Of course you can make a case that the cover-up is always worse than the crime in the media’s eyes, since by definition a cover-up means keeping information out of the hands of (at a minimum) the media. Understandably, they themselves regard nothing as being worse than that. But to anyone with a smidgen of moral discrimination no such blanket statement could ever be made. Indeed, a moment’s thought will persuade us that any cover-up which was actually worse than the crime could well be said to be justified, since if the crime was so trivial as to be less bad than withholding information, then withholding information couldn’t be very bad either. Nearly always it is the crime and the cover-up, and in the rare cases when, as in the indictment of I. Lewis Libby, Vice-President Cheney’s chief of staff, the crime is the cover-up, it ought to tell you that something is dreadfully wrong with the prosecution.

In other words, no crime, no cover up.

Doubtless poor Mr. Libby would have done well to remember how easy it is for a zealous prosecutor like Patrick Fitzgerald to turn any misstatement of fact into an indictable offense, but it’s far from certain that he would have