Amid all the impeachment drama, the New York Times just dropped another bombshell. According to newly released accounts of former national security adviser John Bolton’s memoir, Trump asked Bolton as early as May, two months before the infamous call between Trump and Volodymyr Zelensky, to help Rudy Giuliani score a meeting with the Ukrainian president.

The latest leak from Bolton’s book comes a day after House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Eliot Engel revealed that he received a call from the career foreign-policy hawk expressing concern about the dismissal of U.S. Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch.

Regardless of how the impeachment drama shakes out, there's an alarming subtext to this narrative: In the span of just weeks, Bolton has turned from everybody’s favorite villain to a paragon of integrity — just because he can help the case against Trump. It’s almost as if the last 25 years of bad foreign policy judgment never happened.

We must not forget that Bolton is an uber-hawk who has been wrong on nearly every foreign policy question for decades. His aggression makes former Vice President Dick Cheney look like a wuss.

You may remember Bolton as the man who has made it his personal mission in life to destroy almost every arms control agreement the United States has signed over the last 30 years. Bolton has argued against half a dozen accords and opposes pretty much any agreement that doesn’t result in unilateral disarmament on the other side, dismissing it as weak appeasement. In Bolton’s frame of mind, the equation is a simple one: Why negotiate when you could punch the other side in the face?

You may also remember Bolton for his ingenious ideas for how to deal with other countries.

He's the genius who in 2011 openly flaunted the idea of assassinating Muammar Gaddafi — as if a missile to the head would solve Libya’s problems. In 2012, Bolton recommended finding secular-minded rebels in Syria that Washington could support militarily, politically, and economically in order to kick Bashar Assad out of the presidential palace in Damascus, Syria. The fact that nobody could tell you with any degree of certainty at the time that Syria would turn into a thriving, peace-loving democracy after Assad fled into exile was apparently a trivial matter.

Or perhaps you remember Bolton as the author of ludicrous op-eds such as “To stop Iran’s bomb, bomb Iran,” a catchy bumper-sticker title meant to attract eyes on his central argument: Let's stop wasting our time doing that whole "diplomacy" thing and just drop a few bunker-buster bombs on the country's nuclear facilities. And don't forget Bolton's brilliant take in the Wall Street Journal advocating for a preemptive attack on North Korea.

None of this even touches on Bolton’s personal traits, which can't exactly be described as endearing.

Accounts suggest that Bolton was prone to hissy fits and righteous indignation when somebody dared to provide an assessment that deviated from his own. At one point in 2002, Bolton tried to get an intelligence analyst removed for pointing out that his position on Cuba’s biological weapons program did not square with the evidence.

The fact that Bolton is now being treated by the liberal media and many Democrats as honesty and virtue personified should not erase his horrible record. The longtime bureaucrat is free to sell his memoir, but we would be doing the public a grave disservice by allowing impeachment to polish his legacy.