It’s rare that someone would be grateful for being sued, but one almost suspects Karl Rove, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, and Vice President Cheney are gushing with gratitude now that Joseph Wilson and Valerie Plame are taking them to court. Mr. Wilson and Ms. Plame, have, after all, made a sport of sullying the reputations of Messrs. Rove, Libby, and Cheney with the suggestion that the three engineered the disclosure that Ms. Plame was a Central Intelligence Agency employee in retaliation for Mr. Wilson’s public opposition to the war in Iraq. Mr. Libby stands indicted for perjury and obstruction of justice as a result of the ensuing investigation.

The Wilsons are asking the courts to investigate the core issues in this case without the possibility for the sort of tangents that have marked the wide-ranging special prosecutor’s investigation headed by Patrick Fitzgerald.To offer but one example, their suit charges the defendants with violating the Wilsons’ Fifth Amendment right to equal protection, which, in the words of the suit, “prohibits government officials from intentionally subjecting any individual to treatment that is different from that accorded to others similarly situated and is without legitimate basis.”

We’re no lawyers, but it seems to us that in order to prove that point, the Wilsons will have to establish that leaking Ms. Plame’s name was intentional, to discuss exactly how they were legally “situated,” and to demonstrate there was no legitimate reason to out her. Even on the first point, they’ll have a tough slog. Robert Novak, who first wrote about Ms. Plame’s identity, has recounted conversations with his sources in which they noted Mr. Wilson’s wife’s connection to the CIA but asked the columnist not to use her name. Other reporters who were covering the story have offered conflicting accounts about their interactions with their sources.

As for whether they were treated differently from others “similarly situated,” the Wilsons will have to explain their “situation.” Any discussion will include the fact that Ms. Plame was an operative in a bureaucracy with a reputation for hostility toward the Bush administration, that she nominated her husband, a former ambassador, to go on a fact-finding mission for which he was poorly qualified, that he went about his task in a laughable way, and that he returned to criticize the administration in the pages of a national newspaper while passing himself off as an expert.

After all that, the Wilsons will have to explain why there was no “legitimate basis” for disclosing Ms. Plame’s identity as a member of that bureaucracy, when that fact explains the whole Wilson farce. As part of doing so, it seems to us, they will have to defend themselves from the claim that Ms. Plame herself made her identity legitimate grounds for discussion when she nominated her husband for his Niger junket and let him write an op-ed in the New York Times.

So good luck. The private market for justice — the civil court system — now holds out the promise of a more informative public discussion of Plame-gate than the government prosecutor was able or willing to offer. Evidence, depositions, testimony in open court, the suit will be a nuisance, potentially an expensive one, for Messrs. Rove, Libby, and Cheney to defend. Then again, the special prosecutor’s investigation has already been such a nuisance anyway. At least now the defendants will have a chance to refocus the issue on the Wilsons’ own foolishness, a point that’s been too often lost.