EDITORIAL : AT INQUISITION'S END: NOW, MORE THAN EVER, IT IS OBVIOUS KEN STARR ERRED DURING HIS INVESTIGATION OF THE PRESIDENT.

DAY by day it seems Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr's arrogance and political zealotry got in the way of his assigned mission to collect facts about the alleged official misconduct by the president of the United States.

Starr secured convictions of several of President Clinton's closest associates, like former Arkansas Gov. Jim Guy Tucker and Hillary Rodham Clinton's onetime law partner Webster Hubbell, but he hounded everyone with any connection to the president - a strategy that may have cost him the bounty he most wanted.

But he forced the issue by putting the president on the defensive, trapping him in a box that only one person in the country could escape from. That one person, the Houdini of politicians, was - and remarkably still is - Bill Clinton.

On Monday a confluence of events - the acquittal of Susan McDougal, who along with her husband was a business partner with the Clintons on the now-famous Whitewater land deal, and the ruling by an Arkansas federal judge holding Clinton in contempt of court in the Paula Jones civil lawsuit - underscore Starr's faulty, misguided investigation.

Both cases illustrate why Starr's prosecution failed. He hounded, prosecuted and jailed McDougal for failing to squeal on Clinton but he has yet to make a single charge stick against her.

On the Jones case, Starr, a former judge himself, should have had more respect for the judicial process when he learned Clinton and Lewinsky lied in their depositions in that case.

If he had taken his evidence of contempt and possibly perjury to Judge Susan Webber Wright, the Arkansas judge who presided over the Jones sexual harassment lawsuit, she might not have dismissed it and just might have pursued the case against the president.

Now, two months after the Senate voted to dismiss the two counts of impeachment against the president, Wright has held the president in contempt for impeding justice and deliberately disobeying her orders to tell the truth.

If only Starr had waited patiently, instead of judging the case himself last September and luring the House of Representatives to impeach Clinton, he may have had an arsenal to have driven Clinton from office as he so passionately desired.

Instead he bolstered Clinton's support and perhaps forever destroyed the office of independent counsel.

If he had only trained his prosecutors on seeking truth instead of crafting what they believed was the truth by bullying Clinton's friends and their friends into telling stories that fit Starr's version of events, Starr might have earned the public and political support he needed to do his duty.

Instead, he continues to wage a losing battle. He lost the McDougal case, failing to get a jury to convict her of obstruction of justice for refusing to testify in the initial Whitewater investigation.

Though two charges of criminal contempt remain, he is best to let McDougal off rather than face the humiliation of another embarrassing loss in what would appear to be a vindictive prosecution by a modern-day Torquemada.

What could have been a great and shining moment for justice in America, has been a dim and harrowing tale in our nation's history.

Finally, it's time to move on.