The moment that crystallized things for us when it came to the ethics “scandal” surrounding the House Republican leader, Thos. DeLay, came last week, when the New York Times ran out a piece of more than 1,200 words, the work of one reporter in Washington, one in New York, and one in Houston, under the headline “DeLay Charity for Children Financed by Corporations.” This from a newspaper corporation that sponsors its own Neediest Cases Fund, which helps what the New York Times Company Foundation’s Web site describes as “the city’s neediest children” and “disadvantaged teenagers.” So far as we’re aware, the Neediest Cases Fund does not reject funding from corporations. So we’re not quite sure what it is that the Times is all worked up about in the case of Congressman DeLay’s charity, unless it is the competition.

The Los Angeles Times’s editorial and opinion editor, Michael Kinsley, who is hardly a partisan conservative, describes the specific charges against Mr. DeLay as “bogus technicalities.” Asks Mr. Kinsley, “What on Earth difference does it make whether the Indians, per instructions from Abramoff, sent the money for one of DeLay’s golfing trips to the think tank that was allegedly paying for it before or after the trip, or whether the funds were earmarked or not?” Or, we’d add, for that matter, why should a corporation or a think tank, but not a registered lobbyist, be able to pay for a trip by a congressman?

The real reason the Democrats are out to get Mr. DeLay on “ethics” charges is that he’s an incredibly effective political tactician and they have been unable to defeat him on the substance. The Republicans made this mistake at times against President Clinton – instead of fighting in the field of public opinion against Mr. Clinton’s tax policy or his foreign policy, they went after him on “ethics.” At least in Mr. Clinton’s case, there was a genuine perjury charge rather than mere House rules at the bottom of the matter. So we wouldn’t make too much of the similarity. But we wouldn’t make too little of it, either. A lot of the Democrats harping on Mr. DeLay’s ties to lobbyists for Indian gambling interests have taken plenty of money themselves from the gambling industry, which is a bipartisan interest.

If the Democrats want to come out against gambling, that’s one thing, but that would put them on the side of those pesky moralists on the religious right. And the reason that the DeLay “ethics scandal” is so fun for so many on the left is that Mr. DeLay has been allied with the religious right. To the extent that there’s a scandal here, it’s not about ethics, but about substance, with the conservatives allegedly serving Indian gambling interests who were trying to prevent competition from other Indian casinos. This is at a time when at least 37 states are now running government-sponsored lotteries. The left is supposed to be for legalized marijuana and abortion, but against casino gambling? We look forward to hearing those who defended Mr. Clinton during the endless investigations weigh in on the matter of the DeLay “scandal.” If the Democrats are going to rebuild, our own sense is that they are going to have to do it on substance, not so-called scandals.