So, it's all over the blogsphere, following Atrios, that Republicans have now fessed up to misleading the public about their motives for going to war -- never mind that it was also a staple of Republican thought a few years ago that it was an impeachable offense for Clinton to lie about his sex life.

Old news, folks. Henry Hyde, one of the impeachment "managers" (i.e., prosecutors) in the Lewinsky mess, had put himself on record a few years earlier than that applying a looser standard to Reagan's liars in the Iran/Contra affair:

As a ranking Republican on the Iran-contra committee in 1987, Hyde had this to say at the time about the massive lawbreaking within the Reagan White House: "All of us, at some time, confront conflicts between rights and duties, between choices that are evil and less evil, and one hardly exhausts moral indignation by labeling every untruth and every deception an outrage."

By the way, this explodes a distinction some Republicans draw between Clinton's lies about his sex life, and, say, the adulterous Hyde's own. Clinton's lies were heinous, they say, because he lied under oath. Well, so did Oliver North....