Washington “scandals” and shameless, distilled, partisan hypocrisy are often partners. But for what has to be an all-time low, check out the latest one brewing over who leaked columnist Robert Novak the name of an employee of the Central Intelligence Agency. This one was fanned over the weekend by a front-page Washington Post report that the CIA has asked the Justice Department to investigate a Bush administration leak to Mr. Novak that the wife of Joseph C. Wilson IV works for the agency. Mr. Wilson had been publicly questioning the Bush administration’s claims about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction.

Yesterday, the Democratic presidential candidates piled on. Howard Dean, whose national security experience so far has been limited to securing Vermont’s border with Canada, called for resignations. “There is no need to wait for investigations into the matter — although an independent investigation is clearly in order,” Dr. Dean fulminated. “National security interests have been jeopardized, sensitive intelligence operations have been compromised, a woman’s career has been destroyed, and the lives of many of her sources could be at risk. This is a grave matter.”

“The American public has been misled. Federal laws appear to have been broken,” Governor Dean continued. Senator Kerry characterized the situation as “outrageous” and called for a special counsel to pursue an investigation “removed from the politics of the Department of Justice.” There’s so much posturing and hypocrisy being spread around here it’s hard to know just where to start.

But one place would be with the case of Senator Torricelli. It was Mr. Torricelli, the Democrat from New Jersey, who several years ago disclosed that a Guatemalan intelligence officer was a paid CIA informant. The Associated Press reported back in 1997 that Mr. Torricelli had leaked the information to the New York Times. The AP quoted the Washington editor of the Times, Andrew Rosenthal, as saying the information about the Guatemalan man’s identity came from Mr. Torricelli and was confirmed by two administration officials.”We have no intention of telling anyone who those sources were,”Mr. Rosenthal told the wire. The leakers, in that case, were hailed by the hard left as heroic whistleblowers.

Another place to start would be with the New York Post, the Jerusalem Post, and the New Republic, which all, in 1998 and 1999, named the CIA station chief in Tel Aviv.

We’re not holding our breath waiting for Dr. Dean and Mr. Kerry to call for a special prosecutor to unearth the names of the Clinton administration officials who named the Guatemalan CIA informant or the CIA’s man in Tel Aviv. For Dr. Dean and Mr. Kerry don’t care a fig about the confidentiality of the CIA’s personnel. This “scandal” doesn’t have anything to do with CIA confidentiality; it has to do with the policy battle over the the war in Iraq.

The CIA, as an institution, was hostile to the Pentagon’s plans for war in Iraq and to the Iraqi exiles with whom the CIA and the office of Vice President Cheney preferred to deal. When those war plans became the president’s, the White House was justifiably outraged that a CIA spouse was out there trying retrospectively to undermine the case for war.

The CIA’s response is — get this — to offer, on an anonymous basis, unnamed leaks to the press denouncing leaks. “An intelligence official said Tenet ‘doesn’t like leaks,'” the Washington Post article reported on Sunday. No one inside the Beltway seems to see the humor in anonymous leaks denouncing leaks. The only Washington figure talking sense so far is the crusty newspaperman named Robert Novak.

As for Mr. Kerry calling for a special prosecutor, that’s truly rich. Mr. Kerry voted in 1987 against a provision that would have included members of Congress under the jurisdiction of the special prosecutor law. When Senators Specter, Lieberman, Collins, and Levin introduced legislation that would have prevented the independent counsel statute from expiring back in 1999, Mr. Kerry did not sponsor it. Anyway, if Mr. Kerry has not learned from Lawrence Walsh and Kenneth Starr the constitutional and practical dangers of an independent counsel, well, he’s less ready to be president than we’d even imagined.

The real “scandal” here is that the press and the Democrats are concentrating on Wilson-wife-gate instead of the real national security threats America faces from places like Iran, Syria, and North Korea.