The vindication of a public figure engulfed in controversy doesn’t get more dramatic than that of the former undersecretary of defense, Douglas Feith. A report by the Pentagon inspector general issued last week found that the activities by Mr. Feith’s Pentagon Policy office were all legal and the office’s officials did not mislead the Congress. The report followed years of exceptionally ad hominem attempts by the left to discredit Mr. Feith, accusing him, in effect, of an attempt to mis-lead the Congress into its war declaration. The new report from the inspector general finds that nothing Mr. Feith did broke the law. The worst the report came up with is that some slides in a power PointPresentation presented to the White House were not properly vetted and cleared by the CIA.

This seemed too much for the Washington establishment. The Washington Post on Friday issued a story attributing to the Pentagon inspector general’s report a raft of negative quotes about Mr. Feith, such as that Mr. Feith’s office produced “reporting of dubious quality or reliability” and that the office “was predisposed to finding a significant relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda.” The only hitch was that it turned out not to be true. The quotes were not from the Pentagon inspector general but from a two-and-a-half-year-old report of Mr. Feith’s (and President Bush’s) most implacable political enemies, Senator Levin, the Michigan Democrat. The Post on Saturday issued an elaborate, 248-word correction to the story.