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SUMMARY: You're either with us or against us. That's what President Bush tells other countries. He should say the same thing to his own staff.

A brouhaha of minor, inside-the-beltway proportions involving political spin-doctoring by someone inside the White House now seems likely to mushroom into a full-blown federal case. U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft last week removed himself from an investigation into who in the Bush administration blew a CIA operative's cover. What's with that? No one's saying, but it appears the monthslong investigation has produced evidence convincing Ashcroft that his continued participation would involve a conflict of interest.

Under investigation is the source who reportedly told several journalists that former Ambassador Joseph Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, was a covert agent for the CIA. Wilson is the guy who last summer publicly embarrassed President Bush by writing a column for the New York Times saying the president falsely stated in last year's State of the Union address that Saddam Hussein had attempted to acquire nuclear-bomb material from Niger. The CIA had hired Wilson to investigate the claim more than a year before Bush repeated it, and he'd proved it was based on forged documents. Eight days after Wilson went public with the allegation that the Bush administration had used false information to build its case for invading Iraq, someone inside the White House reportedly outed Plame as a CIA operative. Was the leak intended to punish Wilson, or discredit him? Your guess is probably as good as anyone's. But deliberately blowing a CIA agent's cover is a felony. Even if it weren't, it's not exactly helpful to an agency scrambling to improve its intelligence gathering in this increasingly dangerous world.

The journalists involved would do well to examine the ethics of accepting information and protecting sources under circumstances such as this. Members of the press playing along with this leak have allowed themselves to be manipulated for no constructive purpose. Surely the public's right to know includes the right to know that someone inside the White House is willing to put a blameless CIA agent's life at risk and perhaps even undermine national security. And for what? Because her husband told the world that the president was wrong about Iraq's efforts to acquire uranium? Historians will long cite that allegation as among the most fateful misstatements uttered by an American president. Whatever role the allegation played in the decision to launch last year's war, it surely has played a role in diminishing Bush's credibility at home and abroad. Bush should be furious that the people on his staff hired to prep him for his speech last year got something so important so wrong. He should have fired the incompetents and given Wilson a medal.

Bush should at least gather his staff and demand that the leaker step forward and resign. You're either for with or against us, he should say. Under no stretch of the imagination can the source of this leak be considered with us.

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