‘Scooter’ sentence

Lewis "Scooter" Libby won't be going to prison after all. On Monday, President Bush commuted the 30-month sentence given to Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff for lying to federal investigators.

The president stopped short of granting Libby a pardon, for now leaving in place the felony conviction that will prevent him from voting and likely will cost him his license to practice law. Libby also must serve two years of probation and pay a $250,000 fine. (He's appealing those penalties.)

Those are stiff penalties for someone found to have obstructed justice in a three-year criminal investigation that yielded no other charges. Essentially, Libby was convicted of lying about a crime that never happened in the first place.

The details of this winter's trial were as compelling as a trigonometry textbook. A former ambassador publicly ripped President Bush's reasons for invading Iraq. Eight days later, a syndicated columnist revealed that the former ambassador's wife was a CIA officer. A federal investigation was launched to determine the columnist's source, prompting dreams of impeachment from Democrats, the liberal press and the socialist blogosphere.

Within a couple of months, a special prosecutor learned that a State Department bureaucrat inadvertently leaked the CIA officer's identity. His mistake was not a crime. But the prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, kept banging down doors, jailing a New York Times reporter for 85 days for refusing to identify her source, even though he knew the reporter wasn't even a secondary figure in his investigation.

Mr. Fitzgerald, now far removed from his original charge, catches Libby in a lie. It was a stupid move by the vice president's most trusted aide, one that has already cost him his job and his reputation.

But was it worth 2 1/2 years in prison, when many violent felons don't spend that much time behind bars? President Bush was correct in labeling the prison sentence "excessive."

Cue the frothing from the left. Democrats' over-the-top protests have gone as far as claiming that the president's constitutionally permissible action sanctions lawlessness. Most of these same Bush administration critics tirelessly defended President Clinton against the perjury allegations that led to his impeachment -- and Mr. Clinton lied to a grand jury that was investigating him.

Both Libby and Mr. Clinton learned the hard way that no one should deliberately mislead investigators. Both paid dearly for their poor judgment. Neither deserved to go to prison.

That said, President Bush should halt his intervention at commuting Libby's prison sentence. Granting a full pardon would be a mistake.