Note to the Republican Party re Benghazi: Stop calling it Watergate, Iran-contra, etc. First, it might well be, but we don’t know. History will judge. Second, overhyping will only diminish the scandal’s importance if it doesn’t meet presidency-breaking standards. Third, focusing on the political effects simply plays into the hands of Democrats desperately claiming that this is nothing but partisan politics.

The facts are damning enough. Let Gregory Hicks, the honorable, apolitical second-in-command that night in Libya, grippingly demolish the president’s Benghazi mantra that “what I have always tried to do is just get all the facts” and “every piece of information that we got, as we got it, we laid it out for the American people.”

On the contrary. Just hours into the Benghazi assault, Hicks reported, by phone to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton herself, on the attack with absolutely no mention of any riot or video, later to become the essence of the Susan Rice talking points that left him “stunned” and “embarrassed.”

But Hicks is then ordered not to meet with an investigative congressional delegation. And when he speaks with them nonetheless, he gets a furious call from Clinton’s top aide for not having a State Department lawyer (and informant) present. His questions about the Rice testimony are met with a stone-cold response, sending the message — don’t go there. He then finds himself demoted.

Get the facts and get them out? It wasn’t just Hicks. Within 24 hours, the CIA station chief in Libya cabled that it was a terrorist attack and not a spontaneous mob. On Day Two, the acting assistant secretary of state for the Near East wrote an email saying the attack was carried out by an al-Qaida affiliate, Ansar al-Sharia.

What were the American people fed? Four days and 12 drafts later, a fiction about a protest that never was, provoked by a video no one saw (Hicks: “a non-event in Libya”), about a movie that was never made.

The original CIA draft included four paragraphs on the involvement of al-Qaida-affiliated terrorists and on the dangerous security situation in Benghazi. These paragraphs were stricken after State Department objections mediated by the White House. All that was left was the fable of the spontaneous demonstration.

That’s not an accretion of truth. That’s a subtraction of truth.

And why? Let the deputy national security adviser’s email to the parties explain: “We need to resolve this in a way that respects all of the relevant equities” — fancy bureaucratese for “interests of the government agencies involved.”

Note that he didn’t say the talking points should reflect the truth — only the political interests, the required political cover, of all involved. And the overriding political interest was the need to protect the president’s campaign claim, his main foreign policy plank, that al-Qaida was vanquished and the tide of war receding.

But then the cover-up needed its own cover-up. On Nov. 28, press secretary Jay Carney told the media that State and the White House edited nothing but a single trivial word. When the email trail later revealed this to be false, Carney doubled down. Last Friday, he repeated that the CIA itself made the edits after the normal input from various agencies.

That was a bridge too far for even the heretofore supine mainstream media. The CIA may have typed the final edits. But the orders came from on high. You cannot tell a room full of journalists that when your editor tells you to strike four paragraphs from your text — and you do — there were no edits because you are the one who turned in the final copy.

Note to the White House: Try the truth. It’s easier to memorize.

Charles Krauthammer is a columnist for The Washington Post. He can be contacted at:

letters@charleskrauthammer.com