Minimizing the original crimes?

So everyone's certainly heard the news by now. And now Libby has resigned, yay.

But what I find interesting is this paragraph of the Times story:

"If the charges announced today lead to a conviction or guilty plea, the episode will stand in Washington history as another example of a cover-up becoming more serious than the original wrongdoing."

Actually, we don't really know that. The original wrong-doing, if proved, would be pretty damned serious: the uncovering of a CIA operative with non-official cover who was working on WMD programs at a time whe the administration's purported focus was on controlling WMDs. WMDs in the wrong hands, which was the administration's rationale for the invasion of Iraq, would certainly be much more serious than perjury and obstruction of justice. Endangering our ability to detect and control movements of WMDs in order to prosecute a war with the explicit rationale of... well, controlling the movements and development of WMDs is serious on so many levels that crimes of perjury and obstruction of justice are neglible except as tools to expose these high crimes.

And that's just the exposure of a CIA agent. Never mind the crimes that may be considered on the basis of possible lies told to Congress by administration officials and trumped up evidence to justify a war that's cost the lives of over 2,000 American soldiers and will cost us hundreds of billions of dollars before it's over.

These indictments and possible convictions for the crimes therein will become fading footnotes in the klieglight glare that would be focused on those found guilty of such crimes.