To the Bush Administration’s many detractors, the Scooter Libby trial was always about more than whether the former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney lied under oath about a conversation he had with a reporter.

It was, they argued, an indictment of the Bush Administration itself, over the manipulation of intelligence in the run-up to the Iraq war.

The details of the case are too painfully complex to repeat here. But suffice it to say that Mr Libby was convicted of lying to a grand jury about whether he leaked the name of a CIA operative, the wife of a former diplomat who publicly attacked the administration over some of its pre-war claims about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction.

It was, on this version of events then, not some legal technicality but a story that goes to the heart of America’s woes these last five years – a grand conspiracy with the White House at its heart, to weave a web of deceit about its case for war. When this web of deceit was picked apart by outsiders, the White House would stop at nothing to destroy its critics.

This version of events was clearly the one the prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald had in mind in presenting his case. Mr Fitzgerald, a Chicago-based attorney, from the start evidently fancied himself as a kind of latter day Eliot Ness, the crusading prosecutor from the Windy City who famously took down Al Capone.

Mr Fitzgerald seemed to believe he was onto an infamous tale of crookedness at the highest levels of government over a matter as grave as the decision to take a nation to war.

In indicting Libby and in the courtroom itself he repeatedly implied that there was some vast White House effort to distort the facts, ultimately by breaking the law.

That was also the version some of the jurors in the case themselves subscribed to. One of the more prominent members of the panel, Denis Collins, a former journalist and author of a book about government secrecy, told reporters afterwards he and his colleagues thought the trial of Mr Libby "sucked" and that it should have been a much bigger affair featuring Karl Rove, President Bush’s right hand man, and other officials.

"We asked ourselves, what is HE doing here?" he said of Mr Libby. "Where is Rove and all these other guys? He was the fall guy." (They were, oddly, helped to this conclusion by Mr Libby's own lawyer who began his case by suggesting his client was indeed taking the fall for Mr Rove and then produced no evidence to support the claim).

And so, by this succession of leaps of logic, the guilty verdict convicts the Bush Administration, the war, Tony Blair, and everyone else who ever set foot in the White House in the year before the war.

Harry Reid, the Democrats’ leader in the Senate, called for a full congressional inquiry into the Libby affair.

Unfortunately, even as the word "impeachment" starts to form itself on excited Democratic lips, it is evident that the hysteria is not supported by the facts.

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