Yet what Starr did then is what Mueller and other prosecutors are doing now: uncovering wrongdoing where they find it. That Trump’s hush money to two women has nothing to do with Russia makes the wrongdoing no less contemptible, illegal — and, because it’s about the president, impeachable.

Because the Clinton impeachment saga is still relatively recent, it’s been depressing — and instructive — to watch the two sides in that drama conveniently adopt the other’s former rationale for their own partisan convenience. (Lindsey Graham, this means you.)

But anyone who now calls for Trump to be judged severely should acknowledge that we would have been in a better place today if Clinton hadn’t been so fervently defended back then. Among other things, it might have dissuaded other sexual predators and congenital liars from running for high office.