During the Lewinsky saga of the 1990s, President Clinton made much of his ability to “work for the American people” even as impeachment hung over his administration. Yet, as we learned from the recent report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, Mr. Clinton’s national security adviser, Samuel “Sandy” Berger, nixed at least four separate plans to act against Al Qaeda during what the commission described as the “extremely difficult domestic political circumstances” of the special prosecutor and the impeachment.

Now we learn from a new book by one of Mr. Clinton’s chief negotiators in the Middle East, Dennis Ross, that the Lewinsky investigation compromised the president’s judgment in the talks between Israelis and Palestinian Arabs, as well. “There was no doubt in my mind that under the pressure of the Starr Report, there was a strong desire to show that the President was doing his job, was not distracted, and was visibly dealing with highly sensitive, serious issues such as Middle East peace,” Mr. Ross writes in his “The Missing Peace: The Inside Story of the Fight for Middle East Peace” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux).

Mr. Ross’s gradual process was not sufficient for this purpose. So Mr. Berger and Secretary of State Albright “kept pressing me to bring the leaders to Washington to produce an agreement,” even though Mr. Ross considered a forced meeting unwise and self-defeating. “The pressure from them reached an absurd point,” Mr. Ross writes. Mr. Clinton was even more adamant. He “pounded the table in a meeting with Sandy and Madeleine demanding that we bring Bibi and Arafat now in order to wrap things up.”

Mr. Ross also writes about Mr. Clinton’s failure, in the prelude to the Wye Summit, to press the chairman of the Palestinian Authority, Yasser Arafat, on his security responsibilities. With Mrs. Albright, “I surmised that the President was distracted by the Lewinsky scandal and the prospect of impeachment,” writes Mr. Ross.

Mr. Ross flew back to Washington from Israel to brief Mr. Clinton before a presidential visit to Israel. Mr. Ross writes,”As it turned out, I did not brief the President on Friday; he was busy all day, trying hard to head off the building momentum in the House of Representatives for a favorable vote on articles of impeachment. Instead, I briefed him aboard Air Force One Saturday morning.”

A 1998 meeting in Israel between Messrs. Clinton and Arafat and Prime Minister Netanyahu was scheduled because the “news on impeachment became progressively worse for the President each day. He needed to show he was doing his job, and if he could not bring Arafat and Bibi together, it would look like the Lewinsky scandal had limited his ability to conduct diplomacy. So the decision was made to have the three-way meeting,” Mr. Ross writes.

But the meeting turned out to prove the opposite. During the negotiations, Mr. Clinton “was quiet, and he was writing on his yellow pad of paper, ‘Focus on your job, focus on your job, focus on your job.'” The Israeli minister of defense, Yitzhak Mordechai, “was completely disgusted” and, Mr. Ross writes, the meeting “was going nowhere.”

As we’ve written before, one can blame the special prosecutor law for these distractions to the president. One can blame Mr. Clinton for agreeing to name the special prosector, or one can blame Mr. Clinton for the underlying behavior. One can blame the Republican Congress or the Supreme Court that, over the prophetic dissent of Justice Scalia, upheld the constitutionality of the special prosecutor law and then, in a later case, unanimously refused to defer the proceedings until after Mr. Clinton left office.

We are not among those who believe that a genuine peace was attainable between Israel and a Yasser Arafat-led Palestinian Authority or a Hafez Assadled Syria. Nor are we among those who believe that the lack of a peace between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs is what inspires the Al Qaeda terrorists to attack America.

So in the end it may not have been Kenneth Starr and Monica Lewinsky who sabotaged peace in the Middle East. But Mr. Ross’s account makes clear how the presidential sex scandal affected American foreign policy. It’s a warning to the voters to elect a president of character who won’t be a target for such a proceeding. And in a time of war it is a warning to conduct our disputes in a way that sustains and emboldens, rather than harries and distracts, our national leaders.