Why did the country go to war in Iraq? Frank Rich wonders in yesterday's NYT, but not really. He notes that there's not really an official, justifiable reason -- no WMDs, no links between Saddam and Al Qaeda -- but that's not the real reason: the real reason is, a tight-knit group of senior White House officials wanted to go in. Which means that the crux of PlameGate are the reasons -- real and fabricated -- for going to war. Meanwhile, Newsweek's Michael Isikoff reports that Cheney, Libby, Rummy and co. were up to their elbows in raw intel looking for info to buttress their case: "Together, the group largely despised the on-the-one-hand/on-the-other analyses handed up by the intelligence bureaucracy. Instead, they went in search of intel that helped advance their case for war." Then along came Joseph Wilson with his op-ed and non-WMD assertions, and threw a wrench into that one, and behold, the leak was on.

This week will fill in a lot of the blanks. But if it comes to light that the reasons for going into Iraq were deliberately falsified -- by senior members of the White House administration, reaching as far up as even the Vice-Presidency -- well, this will be one case where the cover-up, bad as it is, actually was not worse than the crime. We'll see. We'll see.