Abuse of the IRS against political enemies was one of the articles of impeachment against Richard Nixon. We’re not talking impeachment here yet, but that’s an indication of how serious such abuses are. We need hearings to get to the bottom of this, and it seems likely that we’ll have them.

Meanwhile, the administration’s already implausible story over the attacks on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, which caused the death of our ambassador and three other Americans, also unraveled further as whistle-blowers came forward to testify that the White House knew immediately that it was a terrorist attack…

A cynic might conclude that these scandals are of a piece. The IRS harassment, focused at an IRS office in the key swing state of Ohio, crippled Tea Party groups during the 2012 election cycle. The blame-the-video spin, meanwhile, obscured the administration’s, and the State Department’s, culpability in terms of poor security and inept intelligence, while protecting Obama’s triumphalist Osama-bin-Laden-is-dead-and-al-Qaeda-is-on-the-ropes election-season line on the war on terror.

Politics over principle — and public safety. That’s what a cynic would conclude is going on here. And you know, these days the cynics are often right.