For nearly two years now, the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame has left Washington’s hacks gleefully collecting names upon which to inflict that moth-eaten “-gate” suffix. A 22-month official investigation culminated last Friday with the indictment of I. Lewis Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff and national security adviser. Avoiding the near-impossible task of prosecuting under the pedantic Intelligence Identities Protection Act, special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald has shackled Libby instead with five different charges – including one count of obstructing the investigation and two counts of perjury.

The investigation’s premise was that top Bush administration officials deliberately leaked Plame’s identity to the press in retaliation against her husband Ambassador Joseph Wilson, resulting in her outing in a Robert Novak column on July 14, 2003. Wilson’s transgression, along with his habit of being a self-righteous drone, was a tense public argument with the White House over President Bush’s 2003 State of the Union address. In that speech, Bush cited documents purportedly revealing Iraqi efforts to purchase Nigerian uranium despite repeated CIA warnings that these documents were discredited. The dispute culminated with Wilson’s incendiary op-ed in the New York Times on July 6, 2003, in which he detailed his March 2002 finding that the Niger documents were forgeries. Officials in Cheney’s office apparently moved to distance the White House from the CIA memos detailing Wilson’s investigation and undermine his authority by emphasizing that Wilson’s visit to Niger was arranged by the CIA on Plame’s nepotistic suggestion.

Democrats, still smarting from Kenneth Starr’s investigation of Bill Clinton’s priapic peccadilloes, had gleefully labeled Fitzgerald’s anticipated indictment-fest “Fitzmas.” And last Friday, the Fitzmas follies delivered three meticulously wrapped packages of payback. Firstly, to most observers, the case against Libby looks formidable. The indictment claims Libby learned that Wilson’s wife was a CIA operative in a June 12, 2003, conversation with Cheney. It also details a July 12 conversation between Libby, Cheney and other officials in which Libby’s responses to pending media inquiries were planned. Libby’s contrary claims under oath that he only learned of Plame’s identity from reporters and provided no new information about her contradict the testimonies of more than ten other witnesses.

Secondly, the indictment finds that Novak confirmed Plame’s identity with “Official A,” a code name which in context refers so transparently to Karl Rove that Fitzgerald would have lost little in choosing “Turd Blossom” as an obviously preferable moniker. Rove remains under investigation, with a new grand jury to be impaneled. Thus, while Turd Blossom did not receive the Fitzmas flushing that even John McCain must have hoped for, he will at least find his inherent foulness augmented by the redolent cloud of Fitzgerald’s lingering probe.

Finally, Cheney lumbers into Fitzgerald’s indictment for only three grudgingly brief cameos, including the aforementioned conversations with Libby. But these points are so pivotal that Fitzgerald plans to summon Cheney to the witness stand in an appearance that promises to be thoroughly grudging but probably rather less brief. Cheney has fantasized of a forcibly democratized Middle East since his days as a lone dissenter on Bush senior’s realist foreign policy team and has long harbored resentful derision for the CIA’s restrictive preoccupation with “facts.” It is no surprise that the indictment suggests he played a key role in encouraging Libby to dig deeper on Wilson – and perhaps to divulge information more freely.

Cheney’s actions here, even if legal, cast a particularly sleazy light on his notorious willingness to submerge realities under the yoke of ideology. Yet Cheney has already been allowed to fill Libby’s vacated posts with John Hannah, an aide involved in gathering erroneous information about Iraq’s weapons programs, and David Addington, a legal counsel instrumental in drafting the Bush administration’s infamous torture policies. “The problem,” one White House adviser told Time, “is that the President doesn’t want to make changes.” Indeed.

Meanwhile, one cannot help but recall Bush’s 2000 campaign pitch about “restoring honor and dignity to the White House.” Alongside Hurricane Katrina and a misbegotten war, the Libby indictment adds to the administration’s resume of increasingly sinister shortcomings, recasting the aroma of light sleaze that once wafted from the Clinton White House as the nostalgic scent of the nation’s frisky fin-de-siŠcle innocence.

Sam Harding-Forrester is a senior in LAS. His column appears every Thursday. He can be reached at [email protected].