More Lie of Heartbreak

There's only one thing missing from this little puffer on the deep personal toll the Libby verdict might conceivably take on Dicky-Ticker Dick:

On a personal level, friends of the vice president say the trial has been deeply painful for him. Mr. Libby and Mr. Cheney were all but inseparable -- Ms. Matalin has called the former aide "Cheney's Cheney" -- and often started their days by riding to work together. Mr. Libby accompanied the vice president almost everywhere he went, and Mr. Cheney made clear his high professional and personal regard for his aide, even playing host to a book party for him in 2002 at his official residence. Alan K. Simpson, a Republican former senator from Mr. Cheney's home state, Wyoming, said he saw Mr. Cheney over Christmas and asked how he was doing. He took the answer as a kind of oblique reference to the Libby case.

"He said, 'I'm fine, I'm O.K., I have people I trust around me — it's the same old stuff, Al,' " Mr. Simpson recalled.

Another friend of Mr. Cheney's, Vin Weber, a Republican former congressman, said the verdict had "got to be heartbreaking for the vice president." But Mr. Weber said he wished Mr. Cheney would explain himself.

"I don't think he has to do a long apologia," Mr. Weber said, "but I think he should say something, just to pierce the boil a little bit."

Missing is the fact that Simpson and Matalin are thick as thieves with the Scooter Libby Defense Fund. Knowing that little fact might put their fables in a whole new light.