It could be the Nixon Era again. For now we know. Or at least we know more than we did about what happened at Benghazi, and, even more telling, what happened afterward. With each congressional hearing, with each appearance by another whistle blower, the picture becomes more complete. And it’s not pretty. It’s more like that Portrait of Dorian Gray hidden away in the attic that, when it is finally uncovered, shows every dirty deception, every scabrous half-truth that is even worse than a lie, every dereliction its subject sought to keep hidden . . . .

As for the Portrait of Benghazi painted by this administration, it has started to reveal every crack and flaw, every rhetorical sleight-of-word used to cover, first, this administration’s feckless incompetence when it came to protecting our diplomats and then, much worse, its attempts to cover its trail even as the true heroes of Benghazi were being brought home in coffins.

As was said during Watergate, it’s not the original scandal that disgraces a politician, even on the presidential level, but the cover-up, the tissue of fabrications a president-and in this case a secretary of state, too-keeps weaving. Only to see it unravel at an ever faster pace.

The truth about what happened at Benghazi-and afterward-continues to out. But we the (ever-gullible) people are supposed to believe that all last week’s sworn testimony is just part of a Republican plot to smear our great leaders. It won’t work. Why? To quote another Republican, one who was also denounced as a troublemaker out to smear his betters for partisan advantage, you can fool some of the people some of the time, but not all the people all the time. And time is running out for those still defending the administration’s execrable handling of Benghazi-before, during and after the slaughter there.

LIKE THE LAYERS of an onion, all the administration’s stories are being peeled away one by one, perhaps not as fast as it can change them but fast enough so that anyone who still cares about the truth can go back and see them for what they were from the first-cover stories. One snow job after the other:

• Even as she stood by as the remains of the four dead Americans were brought home, our secretary of state blamed the assault that killed them on a “mob” inflamed by a sacrilegious video that, we find out, had nothing to do with it.

• The next day, any and all evidence that might cast doubt on Hillary Clinton’s official version of events at Benghazi was scrubbed from the Talking Points distributed by the White House and State Department to their official flaks. Like the fact that the State Department had been repeatedly warned about threats to our diplomatic posts across North Africa but took no action to defend our people in Benghazi, despite their urgent requests. Any references to the terrorists who killed them having ties to al-Qaida went down the memory hole, too. (That terrorist network was supposed to be on the run, at least according to the president’s re-election campaign.)

• The day after that, there came what may have been the most wretched excess of official falsifying since Tricky Dick himself was trying to explain away Watergate. Our distinguished ambassador to the United Nations, herself misled by those now infamous Talking Points, was all over television blaming the attacks at Benghazi on some fictive mob incensed by that amateur video and not on a premeditated, well-organized and brutally executed terrorist operation.

• Not just days but weeks after our diplomats and their defenders were slaughtered, the president of the United States stuck with that story, repeating it again and again-on Late Night with David Letterman, during television appearances with friendly moderators (on Univision and The View), and, of course, before the United Nations, which has never been repelled by falsities.

• Even though the president did repeat a single line of boilerplate about this country’s not being daunted by any “act of terror” in his first statement on Benghazi, both he and his administration studiously avoided blaming the attacks on any actual terrorists. We were all supposed to believe it was that amateurish video’s fault. And that of a mob that had spontaneously formed in reaction to it. Does anyone believe that now? Can anyone believe that now?

HOW DO justice to all this? How sum up this whole, carefully orchestrated series of phony stories? Tom Bevan of the website RealClearPolitics did as well as anyone in his wrap-up of the past week’s testimony before the House Oversight Committee. He said that, though there was nothing there that a lot of us hadn’t suspected, “a fair reading of the record leads to an obvious conclusion: The president and his administration clearly misled the public about what happened on Sept. 11, 2012.”

To quote one congressman, South Carolina’s Trey Gowdy, on Susan Rice’s now embarrassing appearances on television network after television network, her comments “perpetuated a demonstrably false narrative.” But she was just being used by the higher-ups covering their own trail. Or as the CIA’s James Clapper said, “She was going on what we were giving her.”

No need to go into detail, like why Ms. Rice was being given this cover story and told to repeat it. You don’t think it had anything to do with that presidential re-election campaign going on at the time, do you? If the truth had outed then instead of now, it would have blown apart Barack Obama’s pose as the great terror-fighter who not only had killed Osama bin Laden but pretty much dispelled the threat al-Qaida itself represented-even while it was multiplying into branches, cells, and individual fanatics all over the world, not excluding Benghazi, Libya and Boston, Massachusetts.

Every scandal seems to produce not just scoundrels but heroes - like these diplomats who knew better from the first. And now they have let the country down. To quote one of them, Gregory Hicks, his reaction to Susan Rice’s televised and re-televised account of events was immediate: “I was stunned. My jaw dropped.” For he knew “there was no report from the U.S. mission in Libya regarding a demonstration” and no spontaneous protest against that infamous video. As he told the committee, “The YouTube video was a nonevent in Libya.”

And what happened when Mr.Hicks questioned why such an obviously false story was being spread by the administration? What was the response from his superiors? Shut up, they explained. And when he didn’t, he was effectively demoted. Now he’s just a desk officer. Retribution is mine, saith this administration. And nothing seems to offend it like the truth.

Such is the way our secretary of state treats honest men and real patriots. Or as Our Lady of Benghazi shrieked when someone dared ask her a direct question about Benghazi: What difference at this point does it make? None at all, except perhaps to those of us who care about a little detail known as the truth.

Editorial, Pages 78 on 05/12/2013