Frank Rich has an insightful column in today’s NYTimes concerning the Valerie (Plame) Wilson story. I have wondered through all of this why the various players are reacting the way they are. The sudden disappearance of Bolton from public view, the odd jailing of Judith Miller who never actually wrote anything about Ms. Wilson, the lack of attention on Novak and the rabid assaults of the White House and their syncophants on anyone who questions adminstration involvement in travesty.

His comments on Gonzalez are especially interesting because given this administration’s tendency to carefully script every action and reaction I tend to think it likely that more than one person close to bush will find themselves caught up in this.

When a conspiracy is unraveling, and it’s every liar and his lawyer for themselves, the story takes on a momentum of its own. When the conspiracy is, at its heart, about the White House’s twisting of the intelligence used to sell the American people a war - and its desperate efforts to cover up that flimflam once the W.M.D. cupboard proved bare and the war went south - the story will not end until the war really is in its “last throes.”

Only 36 hours after the John Roberts unveiling, The Washington Post nudged him aside to second position on its front page. Leading the paper instead was a scoop concerning a State Department memo circulated the week before the outing of Joseph Wilson’s wife, the C.I.A. officer Valerie Plame, in literally the loftiest reaches of the Bush administration - on Air Force One. The memo, The Post reported, marked the paragraph containing information about Ms. Plame with an S for secret. So much for the cover story that no one knew that her identity was covert.

But the scandal has metastasized so much at this point that the forgotten man Mr. Bush did not nominate to the Supreme Court is as much a window into the White House’s panic and stonewalling as its haste to put forward the man he did. When the president decided not to replace Sandra Day O’Connor with a woman, why did he pick a white guy and not nominate the first Hispanic justice, his friend Alberto Gonzales? Mr. Bush was surely not scared off by Gonzales critics on the right (who find him soft on abortion) or left (who find him soft on the Geneva Conventions). It’s Mr. Gonzales’s proximity to this scandal that inspires real fear.

The whole thing is worth a read.