Patrick Fitzgerald and Mike Nifong---Two of a Kind

Jack Kelly delivers the coup de grace to the "special" prosecutor:

I suspect Mr. Fitzgerald didn't indict Mr. Rove because he doesn't want to be known as the Mike Nifong of federal prosecutors. But it may be too late.

Mr. Fitzgerald was appointed to determine whether the Intelligence Identities Protection Act had been violated. The answer was no, because the law applies only to those who are working undercover overseas, or who have done so in the five years preceding disclosure, and Ms. Plame had been manning a desk at CIA headquarters for longer than that.

Not deterred by the absence of a crime, Mr. Fitzgerald indicted I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Jr., then the chief of staff for the vice president, for allegedly lying about his conversations with Time magazine's Matthew Cooper. But various drafts of Mr. Cooper's story about Ms. Plame suggest it may be Mr. Cooper who has the credibility issues.

Mr. Fitzgerald is a sloppy prosecutor who rushes to judgment, and then has to backtrack, charged Washington, D.C., lawyer Clarice Feldman.

In one recent high-profile case, Mr. Fitzgerald's staff mistakenly sent 16 cartons of classified documents to attorneys for the terror suspects he was prosecuting, she said. In another, Mr. Fitzgerald charged the victim in a financial fraud case instead of its perpetrators.

"Fitzgerald is good at creating elaborate facades which tart up the ramshackle huts to which they are affixed," Ms. Feldman said. "Once those facades are removed, it is obvious the cases behind them are rickety."

Journalists who do not wish to be cross-examined about when and from whom they learned of Ms. Plame's occupation want this case to go away. I suspect Mr. Fitzgerald does, too, but it's hard to dismount from the tiger he's riding.