A historical lens may help us see things with a bit more dispassion. The media obsession with a specific set of gotcha issues, the conviction that they warrant an expenditure of vast journalistic resources, dates to the years after the Vietnam War and Watergate. Chastened by those national traumas, Americans, including journalists, concluded that they had sprung from the debauched or deformed characters of President Johnson and especially President Nixon. “Character” became the watchword in politics.

But character was defined at once too vaguely and too narrowly. The imperative to evaluate character was too broad in that it gave journalists license to vet aspirants for the presidency (as well as for the Supreme Court, Cabinet appointments and other offices) by prying into their personal lives.

Yet it was also too narrow, because the peculiar foibles that the press fixated on were hardly sufficient to adequately judge someone’s integrity or maturity or temperament. The issues of sex, drugs, and Vietnam loomed large for reporters of the Baby Boom generation because they provided an arena in which to work through unresolved feelings about the cultural transformations of the 1960s.

Eventually, the maturation of Generation X — whose members were largely unfazed by tales of sex, pot and draft dodging — diminished the potential of the boomers’ pet issues to blossom into scandal. More broadly, the public was wearying of hyped-up controversies that, it was becoming clear, had little or no relevance to how a politician performed his or her job.

Recently, though, America experienced another trauma. The election of Donald Trump — a rank misogynist and confessed sexual assaulter — over a woman seemingly destined to be America’s first female president jolted many voters. Among its other effects, Trump’s election helped spark the explosion of women’s activism we have seen since 2016, including the long-overdue insistence that we call sexual harassers and assaulters to account. If Mr. Trump couldn’t be stopped, others guilty of like offenses would be policed with new vigor.

As many people recognize, however, for all the big shots, predators and cads rightly brought to justice, there have also been moments of excess — of sober judgment suspended. Most infamously, in late 2017, following multiple claims of inappropriate touching, the Senate peremptorily cast out Minnesota’s Al Franken, before an ethics investigation could even occur. Mr. Franken denied that his actions amounted to sexual harassment, and apologized for them anyway. But when two new stories were posted to the internet in early December, his senate colleague Kirsten Gillibrand led a parade of lawmakers who demanded he give up his seat.

Like Gary Hart, Mr. Franken cannot blame others entirely, since he chose to step down. But a lot of Americans had and still have grave qualms about the lack of due process he was afforded. Clearly, both the media and the political class bore some responsibility for ratcheting up the pressure on him, instead of calling — as they could have — for cool deliberation to determine what actually happened, how severe his offenses were, and whether they should overshadow the many reasons his constituents might wish him to keep serving (as polls suggested they did).