Clinton’s statement may set a new standard for politically motivated evasions of basic truth and decency. Seriously: What difference does it make? Just for low-stakes starters, there’s a guy in California who was put in jail basically because the Obama administration said his stupid, irrelevant video trailer for “The Innocence of Muslims” was to blame for anti-Americanism in Libya and beyond. President Obama went to the United Nations and bitch-slapped free expression in front of a global audience on the premise that “Innocence” was the cause of the attack on Benghazi. Our own U.N. ambassador, Susan Rice, took to the talk shows to peddle a line that was either wilfully misleading or simply totally wrong (Rice was the admin’s point person in early appearances about Benghazi partly because, as Clinton explained yesterday, she doesn’t like doing Sunday morning shows!).

Contra Clinton, it makes a great deal of difference because understanding how this all happened is the first step to making sure it doesn’t happen over and over and over again.