The Register's editorial

There is a time to fish, and there is a time to cut bait.

Congressional Republicans have spent almost three years examining the 2012 deaths of four Americans at a diplomatic compound in Benghazi. Now, despite the fact that no new information has been unearthed for well over a year, the House Select Committee on Benghazi seems poised to continue its work and issue some sort of a report on Benghazi in the fall of 2016, shortly before the general election.

The House committee is the eighth congressional panel to look into Benghazi and the manner in which the Obama administration publicly portrayed the attack on the U.S. embassy in weeks leading up to the 2012 presidential election.

It was matter deserving of close congressional scrutiny. Legitimate questions were raised about whether State Department employees were provided with adequate security and whether the Obama administration deliberately tried to conceal the cause of the attack.

But these questions were answered definitively more than a year ago: Security was lacking in the sense that it clearly wasn’t sufficient to prevent the deaths of four Americans. The State Department miscalculated the growing risk to the U.S. ambassador and his colleagues. As for the cause of the attack, it has been confirmed that American intelligence officials did, initially, believe the now-discredited theory that an inflammatory anti-Islamic video, rather than terrorism, was behind the attack.

Despite these findings, the House Select Committee has reportedly spent 4.6 million tax dollars digging deeper into Benghazi and anything peripherally related to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Libya. To date, it has found nothing of substance, which was made abundantly clear during last week’s marathon grilling of Clinton.

GOP committee members repeatedly questioned Clinton on whether her friend, Sidney Blumenthal, was acting as her official adviser on foreign affairs, despite the lack of evidence pointing to such a relationship. Chairman Trey Gowdy, for example, made much of the fact that Blumenthal, in one email, referred to former defense secretary Robert Gates as “a mean, vicious little” — and here Gowdy paused for dramatic effect — “I’m not going to say the word, but he did.”

“I don’t know what this line of questioning does to help us get to the bottom of deaths of four Americans,” Clinton said.

No one else knew, either. But Gowdy, looking more and more like a conspiracy theorist and less and less like a congressman, was undeterred. “I tell you what,” he warned. “If you think you’ve heard about Sidney Blumenthal so far, wait until the next round.”

With no new information to reveal, the Republicans on the committee seemed bent on provoking some sort of outburst or admission of guilt from Clinton, who is now the leading contender for the Democratic nomination for president.

The exercise seemed to confirm only what House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy said recently, praising the committee’s work as it relates to Clinton’s then-declining poll numbers.

In defending the committee’s work, Gowdy says he has interviewed 41 witnesses that no other committee interviewed, including seven who were eyewitnesses. But this claim simply underscores the fact that Gowdy has strayed far afield of previous investigations, broadening the scope of previous inquiries while still producing nothing of substance.

In fact, Gowdy says he is now focused on Clinton’s emails — but only, he insists, those that “relate to Libya and Benghazi.” It’s hard to conceive of any emails that would shed any sort of light on the tragedy in Benghazi. His time would be better spent looking into congressional refusals to provide funding, requested by the State Department, for additional security at foreign installations.

Now top Senate Democrats are asking the Republican National Committee to reimburse taxpayers for the committee’s expenses. The Democratic request is political theater that only serves to heighten the partisan divide in Congress, but the Democrats are justified in their outrage.

The House Select Committee on Benghazi proved itself to be nothing but a political tool for the GOP — one that cost the American taxpayers almost $5 million.