Moving right along: What could be the motives of someone hired as an opposition researcher? First and foremost, to deliver the goods. Your client doesn’t like to hear, “I spent two months looking for dirt on your enemy and he came up perfectly clean. That’ll be $50,000, please.” And the “goods” requested here were undoubtedly something more specific than just general opposition research. As a former Russia-based operative, the author of this document was surely hired specifically to look into Trump’s relationship to Moscow. This increases the motivation for finding something, no matter what.

Let’s assume, though, that this researcher stayed admirably scrupulous and cautious throughout. Great. Remember when Sidney Blumenthal was sending Hillary Clinton intelligence about how Muammar Qaddafi was hiding in Chad and about to be interviewed by Seymour Hersh? Even if it wasn’t the finest moment in amateur intelligence-gathering, Blumenthal was undoubtedly doing his best. Every reporter hears sensational off-the-record stories about people in high places, and the allegations often sound credible. But even when they come from honest people—including big shots in close proximity to the main players—such stories are unreliable. They rarely check out, at least in my experience. I can’t explain it, but that’s just the way it is.

Now let’s look at the motives of our own intelligence agencies, which did not produce the current dossier but which have allegedly found it credible enough to summarize, adding a warning to Trump that Moscow has dirt on him. On the one hand, they want to stay professional and credible, and that means getting things right, regardless of personal feelings. On the other hand, they undoubtedly dislike Trump, since the man has repeatedly insulted them, and revenge is in the air. As Chuck Schumer told Rachel Maddow, “You take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you.” Is that conspiratorial? Of course it is. But so is everything else surrounding this story. There’s conspiracy one way or another.

Now let’s look at the motives of Moscow. Without question, Russia preferred Trump over Hillary Clinton, whom Vladimir Putin by all accounts detests personally as well is ideologically. Trump wants to ally with Moscow to combat Islamist terrorism, and he has no interest in confronting Putin over Syria or Ukraine. This is all great for Moscow. It’s always in Moscow’s interest to hack into the files of Democrats and Republicans and any powerful political organization in the United States, just as it’s in our interest to eavesdrop on Angela Merkel, because information is power. Surely, it doesn’t hurt to have a file of kompromat on hand, either, should a friendly relationship today get less friendly tomorrow. So there’s no reason to think, from the perspective of motivations, that reports of pro-Trump moves on the part of Putin are crazy.

But then we must also consider the motivations and capabilities of other foreign players, and here the skullduggery goes from the realm of hard-to-imagine to impossible-to-grasp. You can be sure that Washington is full of spies snooping around on behalf of not only Moscow but also Beijing, Tehran, Riyadh, Ankara, Tokyo, Seoul, Pyongyang, Jerusalem, Taipei, New Delhi, London, Paris, Havana, Canberra, and Berlin. We spy on close friends, and they spy on us. You want to see infiltration of Washington by a foreign power? Check out the role during World War II of British intelligence, which seems to have been instrumental in pushing the United States toward involvement in the conflict—by establishing front organizations, planting fake stories and polls, and helping to elect sympathetic politicians. So don’t underestimate the power of our allies to offer plenty of subversion of their own.

All we can do is wait and see and stay skeptical. There are many, many people who want to disrupt the international alliances and understandings that Hillary Clinton represented, and there are no fewer who want to maintain them and look for any way to remove Trump from power. God help anyone trying to sort out who’s pulling which strings in either of these efforts. All we can do is try to keep our heads. It will be one more remarkable show among many remarkable shows. If we pretend it’s just a movie, maybe we can even enjoy it. Or maybe not.