So it turns out that the confidential witness mentioned in our front-page article yesterday by Josh Gerstein is Senator Kennedy’s brother-in law, Raymond Reggie. He has been secretly cooperating with federal prosecutors investigating Senator Clinton’s campaign fund raising. It’s a tale made for those who savor the personal drama of politics, and it’s filled with ironies. Mr. Kennedy and Mrs. Clinton are both leading Democrats. Mr. Kennedy and Senator Clinton’s husband forged such a warm personal relationship that it was the subject of a memorable profile in the New Yorker. Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Kennedy both share the rare experience of having had immediate family members in the White House.

But the biggest irony is that the law at the center of this case – the petard with which Mrs. Clinton’s campaign is being hoisted – is a campaign-finance “reform” law of the sort for which Mrs. Clinton campaigned. Mrs. Clinton voted for the McCain-Feingold law and championed it even though her conservative critics and the American Civil Liberties Union were warning all along it tramples on the First Amendment by limiting contributions to political candidates. We are sympathetic to Mrs. Clinton on the substance of these charges, in the sense that her campaign aide is charged with misreporting contributions to make them lawful under a law that we think the Supreme Court should have ruled unconstitutional to begin with.

It turns out that no sooner did Mrs. Clinton vote in the Senate to lay aside the First Amendment and enact this Rube Goldberg contraption of rules for raising political capital than rules of the same sort were being used by federal agents to prosecute her political aide. (She herself is not accused of any lawbreaking.) It’s a lesson for politicians of all persuasions, but most poignantly for liberal Democrats and McCain-type Republicans. Once you remove the restraints on government, the chances are it’s going to boomerang. And the results can be tragic – members of the family of your closest political friends working with agents of the federal government, in violation of what many of us believe to be constitutional bedrock, to put your own associates in the dock.