If there is any major revelation contained within the hundred pages of e-mails related to the attack that killed four Americans in Benghazi and the Obama Administration’s subsequent production of talking points about those attacks, it is not the kind of revelation that Republicans were hoping for. There is still no evidence that the White House manipulated the public discussion of the attacks for preëlection political gain, or that anyone deliberately lied by portraying what happened as a spontaneous outgrowth of demonstrations going on in the Arab world at the time when they knew it was a planned terrorist attack. And there is certainly no evidence of the darkest, most outlandish conspiracy theory about Benghazi: that the Administration left Americans to die because they were worried that responding to the incident with the force needed to beat back the assault would undermine President Obama’s counterterrorism record.

Instead, what is in those e-mails documents the ways in which things in Washington are affected not by the big names—Obama, Clinton, Petraeus—but by the people who work for them, and the manner in which those staffers jostle with each other to protect their turf and their bosses. There is also a reminder that this “Administration” thing we think of as a single, unified entity is in fact a collection of people competing with each other. And there is evidence of how the effort made to keep all those people happy, to protect their prerogatives and egos, can sometimes come before simply serving and informing the public.

There may not be a better example of this than a single e-mail that comes near the end of the batch released by the White House, as the talking points were being finalized. In it, then-C.I.A. Director David Petraeus, having been given an opportunity to read and sign off on a document that has been neutered by the editing process, writes, “Frankly, I’d just as soon not use this, then…” before shrugging and acknowledging it’s someone else’s call.

Lastly, there is a lesson that will probably not help to solve any of these problems: those left out of the infighting may end up being the ones who get hurt most. Based on these e-mails, it appears that United Nations Ambassador Susan Rice’s staff wasn’t brought in on the discussion of the talking points until almost the very end. It was Rice who went on TV as a face of the Administration and used them, and it was Rice who lost her shot at becoming Secretary of State as a result.

All this does not get the White House completely off the hook. Nor does the discovery that the report by ABC News’s Jonathan Karl that made Benghazi big news late last week included an inaccurate, misleading characterization of an e-mail sent by then-Deputy National Security Adviser for Strategic Communications Ben Rhodes, which made it seem as if Rhodes and the White House were intervening in the process to protect the State Department and the Administration from taking political damage.

White House Press Secretary Jay Carney told reporters last year that “The White House and the State Department have made clear that the single adjustment that was made to those talking points by either of those two institutions were changing the word ‘consulate’ to ‘diplomatic facility’ because ‘consulate’ was inaccurate.” The information we have, based on these e-mails, reinforces the conclusion that could be drawn after Karl’s report: Carney was telling the truth about the minimal role the White House—which appeared to be acting mostly as a mediator between the agencies in conflict—played in the editing. But he was very wrong about what the State Department did. The full truth is that State was clearly very involved in the editing of the talking points and that it was pushing for substantial changes, even if it was not a State employee who physically took pen to paper to implement those changes. (As a C.I.A. staffer said in one of the e-mails, “The State Department had major reservations with much or most of the document. We revised the document with their concerns in mind.”)

This may seem to some people to be a small thing, unworthy of much attention. But Carney, even beyond misleading the public, gave his opponents a concrete, provable example of an untruth, and, in doing so, handed them a story that breathed new life into the controversy over Benghazi. The same holds true on the Republican side: the still-anonymous source who provided Jonathan Karl with an inaccurate summary of Rhodes’s e-mail has proven to be the White House’s best friend in all this. It doesn’t matter whether it was an honest mistake or, as Carney has suggested, a deliberate falsification; the revelation that Karl’s description of Rhodes’s e-mail wasn’t accurate allowed the White House to get back on the offensive, and may ultimately bring the momentum behind the Benghazi story to a halt—at least until the point when Hillary Clinton jumps into the 2016 Presidential race, if indeed she ever does.

All of this should serve as a lesson to both sides, especially now, when suddenly all the discussion in the world of American politics is about potential Administration scandals. Sometimes the truth is embarrassing; sometimes telling it would mean revealing petty squabbles and how much impact they have on the day-to-day business of government. But avoiding it doesn’t help.

Photograph by Jacquelyn Martin/AP.