Here’s how to sum up the Obama administration’s reaction to Iran’s seizure and release of our sailors: dit dah, dit dah dah dit, dit dah dah dit, dit, dit dah, dit dit dit, dit, dah dah, dit, dah dit, dah. We use that language in honor of Jeremiah Denton. When, as a prisoner of war in Hanoi, the admiral and future senator was marched in front of a newsreel camera and forced to testify to how well he was being treated, he blinked out the Morse code for t-o-r-t-u-r-e.

It’s too soon to say how our sailors were treated when they were in the hands of the Iranians who seized them and held them overnight. It’s not too soon to say that it is nauseating to watch our state secretary, John Kerry, himself a former sailor, gushing thanks to the Iranian regime, over to which he is preparing to turn more than $100 billion as part the Iran deal. The spin the administration is putting on this incident is one of the most cynical exercises in memory.

This is lost on almost no one. Senator McCain, chairman of the Armed Services Committee, put out a blistering statement accusing the administration of “pretending as if nothing out of the ordinary has occurred.” Mr. McCain, who was held with Senator Denton and others in the dungeons known as the Hanoi Hilton, also mocked Vice President Biden for describing what happened as “standard nautical practice.” Mr. McCain called the notion “patently false.”

Mr. McCain went further. He noted that “sovereign immune vessels like navy ships and boats do not lose their sovereign immune status when they are in distress at sea,” which our government says our vessel was. Such vessels, he said, are exempt from detention. By “failing to affirm basic principles of international law,” Mr. McCain suggested, the administration “places our Navy and Coast Guard vessels and the men and women who sail them at increased risk in the future.”

This is going to be a constant temptation in the face of the kind of deal President Obama and Secretary Kerry made with the Iranians. Reporters at the State Department had difficulty prying out of the department’s spokesman an acknowledgement that by filming the American sailors and parading their video in public, the Iranians just might have violated the Geneva Convention. And what about other Americans being held by the Iranian regime?

If the Ayatollahs were so bent on better relations with America, one would figure they’d have long since released the rest of the Americans they are holding. We doubt that’s what they’re intending. The sad fact is that the Iranian regime has President Obama and Secretary Kerry right where they want them, kvelling about how a regime that despises America and Israel and is maneuvering against us at every turn. We should never have opened a parley with them in the first place.