A bad lie.

In the first book of Plato's Republic, the question is posed whether justice inheres in telling the truth. Socrates raises the prospect of a friend whom one knows to be not in control of himself. If he asked the whereabouts of a knife, would one really be obliged to tell him? The lesson was that it was necessary to be cautious about general rules, especially about speaking falsely. A "lie" is not every act of speaking falsely, just as a "theft" is not every taking, or borrowing, of property. The pivotal question is whether the act is done with, or without, justification. The Danes, in the 1940s, who were hiding Jews, were not obliged to speak the truth to the Gestapo at the door. But this is strikingly different from an act of speaking falsely for the sake of misleading people to the detriment of their own interests, and for the benefit of the liar.

These ancient propositions carry over into the field of statecraft as well (which was, of course, part of the point in the Republic). Franklin Roosevelt was not obliged to make known to the public --and with that, to the Nazis and the Japanese -- the secret work carried on at Stagg Field. But what if a question about it had arisen under oath? It would have been quite improvident for congressmen to have raised such a question on the public record, for it is part of the function of the Executive to run certain "operations" of danger and delicacy which truly require secrecy. This was the problem that bore on my friend Elliott Abrams during the Iran - Contra crisis.

But there is a notable difference between the refusal to speak candidly for such reasons of national interest, and the willingness to speak falsely to cover one's own personal wrongdoing. Let us put aside for a moment the layers of lying and suborning that defined the business of Whitewater. The sharpening of Bill Clinton's crisis has come with the uncovering of his perjury in the Paula Jones case.

That was a civil case, but the nominal differences between the civil and the criminal have been overstated, for the moral questions remain the same: There is a charge of wrongdoing, of a harm or injury serious enough to be addressed in a legal forum. A judgment has to be rendered; there needs to be a reckoning of guilt or innocence, the assignment of blame or the confirmation of blamelessness, the fixing of punishment or the clearing of reputations. If Clinton lied about Paula Jones, then an innocent person, injured in her reputation, will have suffered further calumnies, while her wrongs go unvindicated. At the same time, the guilty will go free, unreproached.

For the utilitarians, it may not matter strictly that the law punish the guilty, so long as it be seen to be punishing someone. That may be enough to make the criminal classes think twice. But for any system of natural justice -- which is to say, for any system of law in the strict sense -- getting it right is the central purpose of the law: arriving at verdicts that are substantively just; making sure, as much as possible, that the innocent not be punished wrongly, and the guilty be given their rightful name.

It was on the basis of that ancient axiom that Judge Sirica proclaimed years ago that the law has a claim to the evidence of any man -- even if that evidence is contained in private papers held by the President of the United States. On that basis, Sirica forced Mr. Nixon to hand over his personal tapes, the equivalent of a personal diary. On the same basis, that liberal saint, Justice Brennan, insisted that the law may rightly extract blood from the arm of a man accused of drunken mayhem, even if the man were unconsenting.

As far as Mr. Nixon was concerned, I thought that Judge Sirica had swept too cavalierly past the critical barriers of the separation of powers, and swept with an astonishing heedlessness of the stakes we all have in preserving the power of the Executive as "the sword of the law." But congressional Democrats and their liberal allies elsewhere carried out that assault on the Executive with high moral pretension, and so it becomes critical that H. L. Mencken's dictum come into play with full force: In a democracy, people "ought to get what they want -- good and hard." Mr. Clinton's friends made this world, and they must be obliged to live under the laws they made.

But Clinton has persistently demonstrated the vacuity of that cliche that has become the main line of his defenders, for he has shown the clearest connection between his personal wrongdoing and his public functions. When Clinton became the target of charges over sexual harassment, his party suddenly receded in its vocal concern for that issue. A matter once said to be central to the public business suddenly became peripheral. Why should there be any puzzlement then over the deeper, political significance of Mr. Clinton's perjuries?

A man who commits perjury, and suborns it, truly "obstructs" the purpose of the law in protecting the innocent and judging the guilty. Can that man stand with the authority now to direct the prosecution of others, or to vindicate, with moral outrage, the wrongs done to others? But then how is that much different from the unfitness that was there at the beginning? How could a man who dodged the draft become the Commander-in-Chief? How could he claim the authority to order other people's sons into the dangers that he, with his adroitness, had evaded? A public that was willing to overlook that rather dramatic point may be clueless in grasping why any of this more recent unpleasantness is all that important. Yet Clinton himself knows. And that recognition of his own shadiness seems to drive him, in a perverse way, to ventures even shadier.

In these pages recently [July 20], Christopher Caldwell weighed the charges against Clinton and came to the judgment that none of them, strictly, may justify an impeachment. In that assessment I might agree, but we make a profound mistake if we do not understand that this matter runs beyond Clinton. We had a Republican President chased from office, after carrying 49 states -- cashiered for what was, after all, "a third-rate burglary."

The critical point is that what the Democrats brought forth to undo Nixon cannot be left as a set of laws reserved for Republican Presidents only. For what is at stake here runs back to Aristotle's account of the deepest logic of a people's governing itself: it involves, as Aristotle said, the temper of ruling and being ruled in turn. It means that people do not legislate for others the kinds of laws under which they are not willing to live themselves. If the withholding of evidence and the suborning of perjury were enough to drive a President from office, the record accumulated by Mr. Clinton should be more than enough to justify hearings on impeachment. But if we think now that those laws are insufferable, they should be repealed.

A former student of mine, now in Congress, remarked that his colleagues are quite willing to rough up Clinton, but they are reluctant to install Al Gore and give him the standing of an incumbent. Their calculations could be right, but they may fail to recognize the depth of the depravity before them. They may fail to appreciate just how important it is that this problem be exorcised.

It has taken a kind of moral anaesthesia to make the country as insensitive as it has been to the character of Bill Clinton. It is all the more important now that the country stop averting its eyes, and come to an understanding, finally, of why this man must go.