We learn from special counsel John Durham’s indictment of Igor Danchenko that “the FBI ultimately devoted substantial resources attempting to investigate and corroborate the allegations” in the now-infamous Steele dossier. “Ultimately” is right — but not before it relied on the shoddy document to surveil an American citizen in an investigation that produced the Mueller probe and a two-year-long obsession with Trump and Russian built on a preposterous foundation.

The web of deceit is a tangled one, but while the indictment details a shocking story of transnational dirty tricks weaponized at the highest level of American politics, the most significant moral failure was on the part of the FBI itself.

Durham, who is investigating the origins of the FBI’s Trump-Russia investigation, indicted Danchenko on five counts of lying to the Bureau’s investigators regarding the compilation of the information in the dossier. The document was a collection of political opposition research posing as intelligence reports, generated at the behest of the Hillary Clinton campaign, which portrayed Donald Trump and his 2016 campaign as clandestine agents of the Kremlin.

It is worth relating the background in detail.