From the beginning, Democrats have been trying to make this case into something they knew it was not: a smoking gun against the administration. At the outset of the prosecution, Sen. Harry Reid shamelessly said, "The Libby indictment provides a window into what this is really about: how the administration manufactured and manipulated intelligence in order to sell the war in Iraq and attempted to destroy those who dared to challenge its actions. As a result of its improper conduct, a cloud now hangs over this administration." (Reid and others said virtually the same thing after the verdict.)

Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald also pushed the Democrats' conspiratorial lunacy, as evidenced by his bizarre and outrageously inflammatory statement to a D.C. jury in closing argument, "There is a cloud over the vice president." Sound familiar?

How could Fitzgerald possibly say that in good conscience, knowing and having known from the very beginning of the case, that Richard Armitage, not Libby, was the leaker and Armitage was no friend of the administration and even less supportive of the Iraq war?

Predictably, the liberal media has also made its best efforts to turn this trial into Bush's Watergate. Early on they were praying for and predicting that Rove would be indicted. And despite the unconscionably belated revelation that Libby was not the leaker, MSNBC reporter David Shuster stuck with the Democrat template, asking Libby, after the verdict, "Are you willing to go to jail to protect Vice President Cheney?"

Protect him from what? How many times can we repeat that Libby was neither charged nor convicted of leaking -- because he didn't do it? No matter. They just continue to push the theme that "the wrong guy was convicted."

Scooter Libby is the wrong guy, all right, but there is no right guy, because there was no administration misconduct here. Libby is also the fall guy, but not for Cheney, Rove or Bush. He's the left's sacrificial lamb, an expendable human being whose criminalization is necessary to perpetuate their abominable and politically self-serving myth that Bush, Cheney and Rove lied us into war.