In court in Washington on Wednesday, a federal prosecutor from Chicago, Patrick Fitzgerald, offered a high-minded explanation for his attempt to compel Judith Miller of the New York Times and Matthew Cooper of Time Inc. to break the promises of confidentiality they made to sources. “This case is about a potential retaliation against a whistleblower,” he said. The whistle-blower he had in mind was Joseph Wilson IV, whose supposed blowing of a whistle consisted of writing an opinion piece for the New York Times during wartime suggesting that President Bush had “twisted” intelligence “to exaggerate the Iraqi threat.”

Wrote Mr. Wilson, “In February 2002, I was informed by officials at the Central Intelligence Agency that Vice President Dick Cheney’s office had questions about a particular intelligence report.” A reasonable reader might wonder what “officials at the Central Intelligence Agency” were doing in contact with Mr. Wilson, who was America’s ambassador to Gabon from 1992 to 1995. It turns out his wife worked there. The disclosure in the press of that news and, subsequently, of Mr. Wilson’s wife’s name – Valerie Plame – prompted a federal investigation into who leaked it.

A public interest also obtains in disclosing the connection between Mr. Wilson and the CIA, because the CIA – one could almost say a renegade CIA – had opposed all along President Bush’s policy of a democratic liberation of Iraq. It preferred a Baathist coup. So a CIA role in attacking the president publicly about the justification for the Iraq war takes on a sinister aspect all its own, and one could argue that the real whistle-blower in this case is the still-unnamed source or sources trying to warn Americans of what was going on.

Throwing Ms. Miller in prison won’t help in any of this. By our lights, a more mature officer than Mr. Fitzgerald, one with more prosecutorial discretion, would not have permitted things to get to the stage they’ve reached. And a wiser bench would have found a way to deal with the prosecutor’s overreaching, a kind of overreaching that seems, by the way, to happen all too often when special prosecutors are set up.

While we wouldn’t presume to tell the Times how to handle its legal problem, it strikes us as ironical that it is prepared to escort to jail a reporter whose brilliant reporting in Iraq it was unprepared to defend. And it strikes us as passing strange that the same Times that so sanctimoniously lectured Judge Roy Moore of the Alabama Supreme Court about his obligations to bow to a higher court order in the matter of the display of the Ten Commandments is now chastising Time Magazine for bowing to a court order involving a dispute over the same First Amendment under which Judge Moore sought protection.

“The same Constitution that protects the freedom of the press requires obedience to final decisions of the courts and respect for their rulings and judgments,” Time’s editor-in-chief, Norman Pearlstine, said in a statement in which he noted that “even Presidents have followed orders with which they strongly disagreed.” It’s a point to remember as this case – which, again, involves a rogue CIA effort to undermine America’s commander in chief during wartime – works its way through the courts. The real whistle-blowers and heroes here are those who understood this point and got word via the press to the American public.