As well as indicting “Scooter” Libby, Vice-President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, for his role in the outing of a CIA agent’s identity, the prosecutor was going to nail Karl Rove, the president’s chief political strategist. There might be damning references in the prosecutor’s conclusions to Mr Cheney himself, as well as evidence of a broader conspiracy by the Vice-President’s office to illegally discredit its critics.

The principal crime alleged — that a CIA agent’s name was deliberately leaked by White House officials to undermine her husband who had cast doubt on the Bush Administration’s claims about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction — would undermine the whole justification for the Iraq war.

The scale of the hopes being placed in the 44-year-old prosecutor by President Bush’s critics was such that they had a name for the eagerly anticipated day on which Mr Fitzgerald would publish his findings: “Fitzmas”.

But when Fitzmas came yesterday, it wasn't quite as big an event as at one point seemed possible.

True, Mr Fitzgerald did indeed secure the grand jury indictment of Scooter Libby, Mr Cheney’s Chief of Staff, on five counts of perjury, false statements and obstruction of justice. And he did caution that his investigation was continuing, at least for a while.

But it looked last night as though the fallout from the investigation was at the lower end of White House fears and its critics’ hopes.

Mr Rove, the biggest fish of all, seems to be off the hook; the grand jury that indicted Mr Libby was dismissed yesterday and cannot be reconstituted. Nobody other than Mr Libby in the Vice-President’s office was charged with a crime. There was no suggestion of a conspiracy in the indictments. Anyone who thought the results of the inquiry would open a new front in the fight over the war in Iraq was almost certainly disappointed.

Perhaps most strikingly, Mr Libby was not charged with any offence directly related to the reasons the investigation was established in the first place. Mr Fitzgerald did not allege that the Vice-President’s Chief of Staff illegally and knowingly revealed to reporters the identity of Valerie Plame, the CIA agent.

Instead, Mr Libby was accused of lying to FBI agents and to the grand jury investigating the case during the course of Mr Fitzgerald’s inquiry.

This does not, of course, make the alleged offences any less serious. Mr Fitzgerald said yesterday that it was possible that Mr Libby’s actions had helped to undermine national security. Mr Libby has become the first senior White House official to be indicted in more than a hundred years. Though he is innocent until proved guilty, he was forced to resign yesterday, an obvious embarrassment to the White House, especially one headed by a president who came to office in 2001 after the scandals of the Clinton years promising to bring “honour and integrity” back to the office.

And there will be a trial at some point in the next year or two, unless Mr Libby seeks a plea bargain. That is bound to be awkward for the Bush Administration. That will involve testimony from Mr Libby and other White House officials, perhaps even from the Vice-President. That will produce further legal pressure on the likes of Mr Rove and others and is certain to be politically difficult, perhaps during an election campaign.

And yet Mr Libby’s personal legal problems do not necessarily prefigure another round of political problems for a White House that has faced a startling series of setbacks in recent weeks. In the dramatis personae of America’s political soap opera, the Chief of Staff to the Vice-President does not rank very high. It is doubtful that one American in a hundred could name any of Mr Libby’s predecessors in the last 50 years. Mr Rove would have been a much bigger loss; if he is finally cleared of wrongdoing, he will presumably go back to being a powerful force at the President’s side.

It’s been a bad week for President Bush, one in which he has lost a Supreme Court nominee to political pressure and a White House official to an indictment. But there was a sense in Republican circles yesterday that it could have been a lot worse.

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