"NOW America has its own David Kelly affair. " It's called Plamegate.

NOW America has its own David Kelly affair. There is no corpse — unless you count the US troops killed in Iraq, whose number is now 2,000 — but all the other elements are in place. A complex saga, turning on the unwanted outing of a government servant; a media organisation rocked by accusations of sloppy editorial processes; and a judicial investigation zeroing in on the charge that the government cooked up the case on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. It will reach its climax any moment now.

It has become known, inevitably, as Plamegate — with CIA agent Valerie Plame the nominally central player. Nominal because, though she is very much alive, she, like Kelly, is a silent star. The details are just as arcane as they were in the British version, but a summary is possible.

SNIP..."So began an investigation, which is now due to bear fruit. Special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald — playing the role of Lord Hutton — could bring indictments against one or both of Karl Rove, the political supremo known as Bush's Brain, and "Scooter" Libby, chief of staff to Vice-President Dick Cheney. Chances are, they won't be charged under the agent-naming rule — but perhaps with perjury, obstruction of justice or conspiracy to obstruct justice. As so often with scandals, it will not be the initial crime but the subsequent cover-up that does the damage.

To lose high-ranking officials like Rove or Libby would be trouble enough, but the Republican fear is that it won't end there. New York Times has reported that Libby was told about Plame by none other than the vice-president in June 2003. That's tricky, since Libby has testified under oath that it was journalists who first tipped him off about the CIA agent.

How damaging will it be? If it was purely a matter of hardball tactics by his aides, Bush would be able to ride it out. But there is the question of motive. In the words of former presidential candidate and current Democratic Party chairman Howard Dean: "This is not so much about Scooter Libby and Karl Rove. This is about the fact that the president didn't tell us the truth when we went to Iraq, and all these guys are involved in it."

It is this, which makes Plamegate America's Kelly affair. For just as the Hutton process put the honesty of Tony Blair's case for war on trial, so the naming of Valerie Plame has shone a light on the way war was sold to the American public.