On Monday, walking down the street in Washington, I ran into Representative Darrell Issa. Naturally, we chatted about the Benghazi investigation that his committee has been conducting for several months. Like many journalists who haven’t followed every single twist and turn of the case, I found e-mails that had been leaked to ABC News the week before somewhat damning, and I said so. One of those e-mails appeared to show that the deputy national-security advisor Benjamin Rhodes weighed in decisively on the side of the State Department in a dispute with the C.I.A. over what to include in a set of talking points given to officials after the attack on the American Embassy in Benghazi on September 11, 2012.

That report, published last Friday, dramatically changed the nature of the Benghazi story, and Issa’s work suddenly moved from the fringes to the center of the discussion. The congressman seemed to be enjoying a new sense of respect, and he was on his way to talk about the case on TV. He explained how frustrating it was that his staff was only allowed to look at the White House e-mails. They could take notes, but they couldn’t keep the documents or make copies of them. As for the leak about the e-mails, Issa insisted, “They didn’t come from us.”

The following day, the e-mail story took another turn. CNN’s Jake Tapper obtained an actual copy of the Rhodes’s allegedly damning e-mail.

Here’s how ABC, which, as it emerged, had relied entirely on a source’s description of the e-mail, quoted one portion of what Rhodes wrote to his colleagues: “We must make sure that the talking points reflect all agency equities, including those of the State Department, and we don’t want to undermine the F.B.I. investigation.”

Here’s what the actual e-mail said, according to the document obtained by Tapper: “We need to resolve this in a way that respects all of the relevant equities, particularly the investigation.”

The version given to ABC is not close to verbatim. The source added a reference to “the talking points” when none existed, though that was indeed the context of the remark, and, most importantly, he or she added a reference to the State Department.

Rather than conspiring with the State Department to scrub the talking points, Rhodes appears to have been doing his job as a senior N.S.C. official. The purpose of the N.S.C. is to adjudicate interagency disputes. When the N.S.C. is functioning properly, it serves as an honest broker that takes into account every department’s position—or “equities”—and provides a forum to come up with a consensus policy, which is exactly what happened in this case.

When Jonathan Karl, the ABC reporter, went back to his source for an explanation, he was told:

WH reply was after a long chain of email about State Dept concerns. So when WH emailer says, take into account all equities, he is talking about the State equities, since that is what the email chain was about.

Read that again, closely: “When WH emailer says, take into account all equities, he is talking about the State equities.”

As a reporter, sometimes you have a hunch about how something you’re investigating played out, even though you only have small pieces of the puzzle. There’s a great temptation to overlay your theories onto the facts in front of you. Whoever deceived ABC seemed to be doing something similar, adding details to a basically innocuous e-mail to make it fit a larger picture of malfeasance.

Is the White House completely innocent in this back-and-forth? No. We still only have pieces of the puzzle, and Obama officials could—and should—release all of the documents they shared with Issa’s committee. But, after yesterday’s news, the Congressman’s investigation seems decidedly less explosive.

And of the three controversies currently preoccupying Washington—along with whether the I.R.S. targeted conservative groups and the Department of Justice secretly subpoenaing A.P. phone records—Benghazi is the only one in which White House officials even play a role. The highest-ranking official implicated in the I.R.S.’s egregious targeting of conservative groups is the deputy commissioner for services and enforcement. The highest official with knowledge of the Justice Department’s subpoenas of the Associated Press is Deputy Attorney General James M. Cole. This makes the two stories decidedly less sexy. “Impeach the D.C.F.E.!” and “Fire James M. Cole!” are not terrific rallying cries.

There is a great deal still to learn about all three cases. But, contrary to much of the reporting and punditry, my sense is that Tuesday saw the peak of scandal-mania for a while. We learned that the most dramatic Benghazi revelation is not as incriminating as advertised, and that the actions of the I.R.S. appear to be confined to that agency. For what it’s worth, as a journalist, I do find the A.P. subpoenas by far the most troubling of these three cases. (Lynn Oberlander, The New Yorker’s general counsel, lays out some of the reasons why.)

Both the political press corps and the Republican opposition are, not unreasonably, preoccupied with the White House’s role in major events, and coverage of these three scandals will rise and fall depending on the level of White House involvement, which so far ranges from modest to nonexistent.

The larger problem with the scandal culture in D.C. is that, because each example of government wrongdoing quickly morphs into a partisan effort to attack the White House (the same was true when a Republican was President), the actual remedies for the problems uncovered become almost beside the point. A U.S. congressman will probably go farther in his party hierarchy by roughing up Obama than he will by helping to pass legislation to ensure that all diplomatic posts have adequate security. Likewise, the I.R.S. abuses suggest the need for both major tax reform and changes to campaign-finance laws, while a future dragnet of news media phone records could be prevented if a strong federal shield law were in place. Don’t hold your breath waiting for any of these policy changes.

Above: Darrell Issa welcomes Gregory Hicks, the former deputy chief of mission in Libya, at a hearing about the Benghazi attack. Photograph by J. Scott Applewhite/AP.