There is a stubborn fact Republicans may want to consider as McCain, their wayward foreign-policy guru, tries to browbeat them into Libya Act II — because, you know, Act I has worked out so well. It is this: The Obama administration’s shocking derelictions of duty in connection with the Benghazi massacre cannot erase the GOP fingerprints all over the Libyan debacle. Obama is the one who took us over the cliff, but only after McCain shoved him to the very edge.

Obama’s Libya war, which the president was pleased to lead from behind while McCain whirled in front, was not authorized by Congress. This was fine by McCain, who declared that saving Benghazi was too important to delay over such constitutional trivia as a green light from the American people’s representatives. After all, what would America have done without Benghazi? So Libya now stands as a treacherous precedent that a president may unilaterally take us to war, in consultation with the Arab League’s Islamist regimes, under circumstances in which not only are there no vital American interests to be served but our intervention actually disserves our interests by empowering America’s enemies.

To be generous, post-intervention Libya was a disaster long before our ambassador and three other Americans were killed by jihadists nine months ago. Our mysterious diplomatic facility in Benghazi had been a terrorist target for months before September 11, 2012 — and the purpose for having a State Department mission in a place so notoriously perilous for Americans has still not been explained. Qaddafi’s weapons depots were raided by jihadists and now facilitate their rampages across North Africa. In Libya itself, as Barry Rubin catalogues, armed militias run rampant, Western facilities (such as the French embassy in Tripoli) continue to be attacked, and the al-Qaeda-affiliated jihadists who murdered our officials are the de facto rulers of Benghazi. What passes for a central government is too impotent to establish its authority.