As fun as it is taking down Gonzales, City Slicking would like to ask something of both reporters and our elected brow-beaters: stick to the original sin.

One of our culture’s many self-destructive cycles is the need to elevate personalities beyond all reason, and after that gets boring, ecstatically drag them back into the mud with us. (Some people call the downward stroke Schadenfreude—that’s a really long word!) Most damaging in recent memory was the fun we had with B. Clinton, setting off a chain of political events that left us instigating and supervising an endless Baghdad street fight (among other things).

It’s surprisingly easy to take people down. Everyone—okay, everyone who isn’t in a persistent vegetative state—does bad stuff sometimes. Clinton got an extramarital b.j. from an intern. That’s bad! Just not bad enough. So we had him testify about about it under oath, and of course he kind of lied a bit. But if not for Star’s zealous pursuit, the impeachable offense would never have occurred.

Another of our favorite examples is, naturally, Martha Stewart. Most people think she was jailed for insider trading; this is not the case. She wasn’t even charged for insider trading! The charges against her (all of which the “little guy” jury found her guilty of) were for transgressions while being investigated. (This post-argument, pre-verdict piece by Henry Blodget lays it all out.)

This pattern is so common we’ve got a cliché for it: “the cover-up was worse than the crime.” But here’s an idea: stop tricking people into doing “worse” things. Considering our successful hunts of the past decade, not only can we assume that normal people’s closets are housing semi-legal skeletons, but also that opening the closet door will cause them to panic and lie in ways that violate the myriad obstruction of justice laws. It’s an underhanded trick of federal investigators that we should be working to curtail in general, not exploiting upon whoever displeases the public this week.

So, Gonzales. What an idiot! He didn’t have to say he “was not involved in any discussions about what was going on” in that press conference. Not only was the claim quickly disproved, it never played well in the first place to say he was a disconnected tool.

But, this is a guy who has had to stand up and lie to us since Ashcroft stepped down from that role. It has been his job to cover up the various constitution-bending activities of his president, and he has done that as well as anyone could have. And being so comfortable in truth-stretching to protect the administration, it’s only natural this his first instinct to protect himself was to do the same. Unfortunately for him, inquiries into his transgression can not be halted out of a claimed threat to national security.

Yippee, we’ve caught him in a lie. He really is “at the end of the day” in his political career. The question we have to ask ourselves, in pursuing the matter any further (particularly in forcing people to swear to the past six months’ bureaucratic machinations), is what exactly the point was in the first place?

A swath of political appointees were fired in what appears to be retaliation for not being political lackeys. That’s nasty business even by Bush standards, but it’s probably not illegal. If congress thinks that’s a problem, they should face it directly and draft new laws limiting the Department of Justice as a tool of the executive. Chasing inept Gonzales and the evil Rove, while leaving intact the system they thrived in, is exactly what they want us to do. The appropriate, cool-headed response to the exposed abuses of this power-crazed administration is to reverse its legacy, leaving the executive branch with less power than when G.W.B. came in.

Because a good hen house is better than taking pot shots at a covey of flushed quail.