There’s an old moral precept, derived from classical teaching, that virtue is its own reward. Right about now liberals may be slowly coming to learn the wisdom behind this thought. You can see this in the way many liberals are now engaged in self-flaggelation about whether Clinton should have resigned from office in 1998 when the Lewinsky scandal blew up.

To be sure, much of this is political posturing, since Democrats want to use the sex harassment issue to defeat a Republican senate candidate next month. But the situational ethics of liberals is not exactly a new observation. A better question is whether Democrats would have been better off if they hadn’t nominated Clinton in the first place in 1992.

Churchill once wrote that the chain of destiny can only be discerned one link at a time, so counterfactual histories are always a bit chancy. But consider: if Clinton had resigned in 1998, Al Gore would have become president, and my guess is, running as an incumbent probably would have enabled him to find another 700 votes in Florida. (So maybe conservatives should be grateful to Clinton’s stubbornness.)

Who knows if we’d have gone on to have President Obama, but one thing is certain: we’d never have had Senator Hillary Clinton, and Democrats wouldn’t have been saddled with her pathetic candidacy in 2016. Which means we probably wouldn’t have President Trump today. No wonder some liberals are turning on the Clintons at last: a few of them are starting to recognize what a disaster they’ve been.

The cherry on top of this sweet sundae is that there is talk of a special prosecutor to investigate Hillary. I hear Ken Starr is tanned, rested, and ready.