Well, then, maybe the transgression is that administration officials, for some unfathomable reason, willfully lied when they said the attack was in reaction to an anti-Islam video produced in the United States and disseminated on the Internet.

The problem is that there were, in fact, tumultuous anti-American demonstrations taking place in cities throughout the Muslim world because of the video. President Obama labeled the Benghazi assault an act of terror almost immediately — as Mitt Romney learned in the second presidential debate — but it was hard to imagine that the attack was completely unrelated to what was happening in Cairo, Tunis, Khartoum and Jakarta.

The Obama administration was eager to make clear, as George W. Bush tried to do many times, that the United States is not fighting a war against Islam. The administration was slow to recognize that the uproar over the video, at most, provided the opportune moment for a well-planned, highly organized terrorist attack involving heavy weapons. This was an error, but it makes no sense as a deliberate attempt to deceive. What would be the motive? To cover up the facts and maximize the administration’s embarrassment once the truth finally came out?

Maybe that’s it: a cover-up. Perhaps the administration conspired to hide Clinton’s failure to protect our diplomats overseas. But she commissioned an independent report by former ambassador Thomas Pickering that said — well, I’ll just quote Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.), chairman of the House intelligence committee: “The Pickering Report appears to make clear what we already knew: that there was strategic warning from the intelligence community of a dangerous security environment in Benghazi and that our diplomats were failed by the bureaucracy at the State Department.”