Joseph C. Wilson and Valerie Plame were one of those Washington couples whose careers had ended on the lower-middle rungs. Of course, this judgment depends on what you call "lower-middle." OK, Wilson did end his State Department career as an ambassador, with the "your excellency" stuff and all that. But his last posting was as envoy to Sao Tome and Principe, two small volcanic islands situated in the equatorial Atlantic, consisting of 386 square miles and populated by 160,000 people. This republic has no yellowcake. It surely is one of those designated diplomatic hardship spots. In any case, it is represented in the United Nations--as central to world affairs as Kiribati and Palau, also members. After leaving State, Joe went to Bill Clinton's National Security Council, where he worked again on Africa policy, such as it was. Valerie, as everybody now knows, was "outed" from a "secret" job many people in Washington already knew she had. And, as a very recent Washington Post editorial, "End of an Affair," argued (September 1, 2006), it was her husband himself who was responsible for putting her in the (ever-so-slight but hysterically exaggerated) danger she may have found herself. Joe and Valerie have been Washington celebrities for upwards of three years. Or, rather, celebrity self-styled victims of Karl Rove and Richard Cheney. Myself, I never thought the case even touched on important matters. (I explained why twice: July 21, 2004 online and May 30, 2005 in the print edition.) Except for the puzzling question of why the CIA had sent a retired diplomat without spook skills to Niger, a country in which he had served as a low-level embassy staffer, on an intelligence mission for which he had no special capabilities. It was after that trip that he went public on the op-ed page of The New York Times. Were there contacts between Saddam Hussein's Iraq for the purchase of uranium from Niger? Joe Wilson said no. An independent commission in the United Kingdom said yes. We are lucky that a deal was never consummated. No one is interested in the case of the "outed spook" and her "outer" any longer. And that is because we now know who exposed the lady to Robert Novak, and he isn't and never was part of the Cheney White House. He was part of the anti-Cheney State Department, liberal heroes, sort of. That man is Richard Armitage, latterly deputy secretary of state and multi-lateralist par excellence. He has now expressed his soulful contrition for the leak. One thing everybody in Washington knows about Armitage is that he doesn't take another kind of a leak without asking Colin Powell first. So there is now added to this weird case the question of what were Armitage's--and Powell's--motives in this exposure. And they should also be asking about Lawrence B. Wilkerson, Powell's chief of staff at State, and his possible role in this affair. None of these men were especially taken with the Bush administration's war in Iraq. So they are, so to speak, off the hook with the anti-war folk with regard to the leak. The fact is that neither Armitage nor his associates ever told the president who was responsible for the leak. If I were George W. Bush, I'd be ripshit. And, since Armitage two weeks ago unambiguously admitted to being the culprit, should he not now face charges? Now, there is one person who has been indicted--not for violating the Intelligence Identification Protection Act, the law which Armitage has actually confessed to breaking--but for obstructing Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald's investigation. (Read Jeffrey Rosen's TNR article "Overcharged," November 14, 2005, here.) The indicted man is Lewis "Scooter" Libby, and he has become MoveOn's designated scapegoat for the entire war. Folk who wouldn't have thought Alger Hiss or the Rosenbergs or Philip Agee guilty of treason have been calling him a traitor. This is laughable. Let me concede: I am a friend of Scooter Libby. But I do not like his boss. And I do not like his boss's wife. I know this gets me no credit with the all-or-nothing crowd. Still, I like Scooter, who is quite brilliant, very honest, and brave. Also funny. I've contributed to The Libby Legal Defense Fund and have joined the fund's advisory committee, which is not large because in Washington old pals dessert when even their college roommate gets into trouble. In a time when self-styled civil libertarians are giving money to defend Muslim terrorists, I am happy to help defend an American patriot, some of whose politics I do not share and some of whose politics I do, from a cynical onslaught of the special prosecutor who put journalists into jail for not telling him what he already knew. The campaign of wrath and virtue against Libby was mostly fueled by simulated outrage. Now that everybody knows who committed the offense, such as it was, the charges against Libby should go into the trash.