CBS isn't the first network to be burned on a Benghazi story. In May, ABC News was given (apparently by a member of the loyal Republican opposition) copies of emails that, it claimed, showed how the White House had worked to bury the news that the attack was carried out by terrorists. Those emails were revealed in short order to be only summaries of a small portion of the entire chain, a chain which suggested that it wasn't the White House that demanded the reference to terror be removed.

The primary culprit in the CBS case is, of course, Davies, who, the facts support, was working for the government in Benghazi at the time of the attack. Davies' motivation for his exaggerations isn't clear, but the prospect of celebrity is an eternal lure — as is the prospect of the money he'd make from the book that he's currently pitching. (A book, CBS somewhat quietly admitted on Friday, that is being published by one of the network's subsidiaries.) And it is still possible that there will be new revelations that suggest that the Obama administration made mistakes or hid the truth — in the sense that there could always be new revelations to that effect on anything at any time.

Benghazi is one of the tent poles of conservative accusations that the Obama administration is rife with scandal and fundamentally corrupt. The email leak happened in the same week as the revelations that the IRS had improperly set aside Tea Party groups for scrutiny, and of the Justice Department's subpoena of a massive amount of phone records from the Associated Press. Republicans are still pressing the IRS scandal, as a new subpoena from Rep. Darrell Issa's oversight committee suggests. The pattern with the IRS scandal has been similar to that of Benghazi: a new revelation championed by Republicans, discovery that the revelation isn't quite the silver bullet the party has suggested. (We've gone over this before.)

The liberal group Media Matters, recognizing early the flaws in the 60 Minutes Benghazi report, was quick to get Republicans on the record in support of it. They've compiled an extensive list of praise for it, which will almost certainly be followed by calls for apologies that will not be forthcoming. But it points out that the outrage-generation cycle at play in the Obama "scandals" survives largely because it successfully generates outrage. And viewers. And shares. This is why Benghazi is in the conversation at all: because people who don't like Obama want to believe he did something wrong. Sometimes, people who want blockbuster stories fall into the same trap.

This article is from the archive of our partner The Wire.