How many people from Donald Trump’s campaign and inner circle have to confess to crimes or be convicted of them before it is clear to everyone — Republicans especially — that the campaign was guided by criminals, if not was a criminal enterprise itself?

Tuesday’s conviction of former campaign chairman Paul Manafort and guilty plea by the president’s former lawyer Michael Cohen provided the utmost amplification of this reality. But it was Cohen’s implication of Trump in a felonious conspiracy to violate campaign finance laws that kicks the national crisis through which we are suffering up another level.

This accusation cries out for a congressional inquiry, and not the sham, partisan, joke investigation that the Republican-led House Intelligence Committee conducted into Russian meddling. We need to know if the president broke the law and did so for his own benefit to influence the election.

But that would require some sense of courage and patriotism among Republicans in Congress, and those qualities have been severely lacking.