Not this time. Watching Fitzgerald’s press conference on Friday was to witness that rare event: a public official whose integrity seemed unimpeachable. Here was a pasty-faced Irish-Catholic bachelor, the son of a new York doorman, educated by Jesuits, speaking with rapid-fire ferocity and almost preternatural precision. In two years: no leaks from his office. Under his belt in previous cases: terror master Sheikh Omar Abdul Rahman, mobsters in Chicago, and several key state politicians in Illinois.

Fitzgerald also has a record of being ahead of the game. He started investigating the activities of Osama Bin Laden as long ago as 1996. In the Illinois corruption case, Fitzgerald raised an investigation into a truck accident in 1998 into a progressively brutal exposure of government corruption.

By December 2003, the investigation culminated in an indictment of George Ryan, the former governor. The case continues — but its course is instructive of Fitzgerald’s methods.

Beginning with a few indictments, Fitzgerald progressively managed to get witness after witness to cough up more evidence. It took several years and 65 previous defendants before the path of corruption could be clearly traced all the way to the governor’s office. And then the former governor was indicted as well.

If you want to know why there was little relief in the Bush administration when only one official, Scooter Libby, was indicted for obstruction of justice, perjury and lying, this history is instructive.

For years in Chicago, because Fitzgerald hadn’t yet accumulated enough evidence, Ryan was referred to in the Illinois case as State Official A.

In the Libby indictment, the same formulation popped up — Official A — but this time, in the White House. Most people assume the title refers to Karl Rove, the president’s key political adviser. Ominously, Fitzgerald refused to say that Rove was out of legal jeopardy, even though he hasn’t been indicted. Yet.

For Bush, moreover, Fitzgerald is beyond reproach. Here is a man who was fighting Al-Qaeda years before George W Bush even heard of it. Here is someone appointed to the case by John Ashcroft, former attorney-general and arch-conservative. Here is an issue — the national security importance of CIA operatives’ secret identities — that Bush publicly supports, and that his father, a former CIA director, believes in passionately.

There is no way to do to Fitzgerald what the Clintonites managed to do to Ken Starr. And so the president had to stand there on the White House lawn and take the hit.

If the indictments had come at a different moment, the president might have been able to withstand them a little better. But they come at a moment of real danger for this presidency. It is a truism that every second term in American politics comes a cropper via scandal. It is equally a truism that scandal can be overcome.

Reagan survived Iran-Contra to end the cold war; Clinton pivoted off the Lewinsky impeachment into public sympathy and an economic boom. But the lesson of the previous two two-term presidents is not so encouraging. Johnson bowed out of a second full term in 1968, crippled by Vietnam. Nixon . . . well, you get the picture. The question now is whether Bush will follow the Clinton-Reagan model or the Johnson-Nixon one.

The good news is that Bush seems unlikely to be touched directly by the current scandal. The bad news is that he is in an objectively worse position than Reagan or Clinton. Both those presidents came undone well into their second term, not at its outset. And their record was stronger at that point than Bush’s is now.

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