Professor James Moriarty of America, the man responsible for shredding the Constitution’s checks and balances, waging the illegal war in Iraq, destroying the climate with industrial waste, and plotting the imminent sneak attack on Iranian innocents, is also at the same time a bald-headed, gravelly voiced, serial heart-attack survivor named Dick Cheney, who commands his hired guns from the usefully ill-defined Office of the Vice President.

I learned these charges and a deal of the supportive warrants for the impeachment hearing (pending Speaker Nancy Pelosi) from a vigorous new book by two veteran, Austin, Texas, reporters. In “Vice: Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the American Presidency,”Lou Dubose and Jack Bernstein have assembled Mr. Cheney’s political biography as Dr. Watson built the case for Sherlock Holmes’s death-grapple with Professor Moriarty at Reichenbach Falls. (“At this fearful place, Sherlock Holmes vanquished Professor Moriarty, on 4 May 1891.”)

It is Hollywood-thrilling to follow the trail of this modern crime-prince. What at first seems reckless stubbornness, when Mr. Cheney’s first heart attack at age 37 didn’t stop him from winning his first election, is quickly revealed as deep cunning when it’s shown that Mr. Cheney was dispatched to Congress by his fellow triumvirs, Donald Rumsfeld and George H. W. Bush, who organized their cabal in the last days of the Ford administration.

The cabal momentarily showed itself in the Halloween Massacre of 1975, when the unwitting President Ford was manipulated to unhorse Nelson Rockefeller, to demote Henry Kissinger from Rasputin to water boy, and to fire Richard Colby of the CIA and James Schlesinger of Defense in order to establish George H. W. Bush as spy chief. The triumvirs were planning ahead, in anticipation of installing Mr. Bush in the Office of the Vice President for the Reagan administration, where, with his consigliere James Baker, he could run the Iran-Contra affair. Mr. Cheney, in the meantime, pursued a malevolent agenda in Congress — promoting Johannesburg apartheid, trading with Tehran, and transforming Wyoming into a nuclear rocket base for the coyly named Peacemaker.The cabalists were

also grooming a new generation of provocateurs, such as the devious Newt Gingrich, the duplicitous Paul Wolfowitz, and the Oedipal and useful George W. Bush.

Mr. Cheney’s cool triumph as secretary of defense for the first Bush administration prompted him to lead the next phase for the cabal, the annexation of the Persian Gulf oilfields. Understood correctly, Mr. Cheney’s Halliburton years were not only to enrich Mr. Cheney but also to recruit a team of energy tyros, including Enron’s brittle Ken Lay, all of whom met in

the first months of the Bush administration in extralegal secrecy to plot ahead. “Why were the vice president and a group of oilmen poring over maps of Iraq long before there was any pretext to invade the country?” Messrs. Dubose and Bernstein rhetorically ask. “Iraq’s oil was technically embargoed and under U.N.control — why make plans for divvying up its oil reserves?”

After Kabul fell, it was Mr. Cheney who persuaded President Bush to attack Baghdad; it was Mr. Cheney who handed Halliburton the Iraqi graft contract; it was Mr. Cheney who directed the suppression of the CIA, using the surrogate target of Valerie Plame; it was Mr. Cheney who opened the secret torture chambers that have wrecked American virtue, and it is Mr. Cheney who will now trigger the next phase, the nuclear war (Iran has Soviet nukes and launchers) with Tehran.

“Everybody seems to believe that we’ll be bombing Iran after the November elections,” Messrs, Dubose and Bernstein quote a State Department source from the spring of 2006. “It feels like the decision has been made.”

Dr.Watson did not explain Professor Moriarty’s psychology. However, it is useful to ask why Dick Cheney has become an American despot. Messrs. Dubose and Bernstein, while not forgiving Mr. Cheney’s messianism and cruelty, point to brain damage suffered during his numerous heart events.”The possibility that Cheney’s health problems and the medications his doctors prescribe for them affect his mental state is real.”

To be fair-minded, Messrs. Dubose and Bernstein do close their book with 25 questions for the vice president, which, if he were to answer (e.g.,”Why won’t you release your complete medical history and the list of medications you take?”), would make chairman (to-be) of the Judiciary Committee John Conyer’s bill of impeachment job much less Byzantine and would speed us to the next generation of the cabal, the ascension of Dick Cheney’s handpicked successor, Condoleezza Rice. It’s unlikely the road ahead will be so straightforward; and “Vice” is bold warning that, were the Democrats to fail at the polls next month, it’s Reichenbach Falls for all of us.

Mr. Batchelor is host of “The John Batchelor Show,” now on hiatus.