That Vice President Dick Cheney accidentally shot his hunting buddy in the face on Saturday is a lot of things, depending on how you look at it and how well victim Harry Whittington's recovery goes: alarming, surprising, a little bit funny.
That Dick Cheney, the White House and Press Secretary Scott McClellan all failed to report the incident to the media for a day is another few things: predictable, characteristic, a little bit wrong.
However you look at it, one thing is sure: This accidental shooting is far from the worst thing that Dick Cheney has ever done, and the failure to disclose it is not even close to being the most dishonest thing the administration has ever done.
Quailgate thus far has been slightly scandalous and slightly unnerving: After all, Dick Cheney shot somebody in the face and then just kind of hoped nobody would notice.
But the amount of time and outrage that the media have frittered away on covering the incident is completely disproportionate to the incident's significance. Cheney's mishap has absorbed attention that would be better spent elsewhere.
In the days since the specifics of the episode became known, the media have shrilly demanded an acceptance of responsibility (finally offered yesterday: "You can't blame anybody else; I'm the guy who pulled the trigger and shot my friend," Cheney said to FOX News Channel's Brit Hume), details and an explanation for the amount of time that passed between the incident and its divulgence to the public.
Fine. The details are the media's to uncover, and the delay in disclosure is theirs to complain about and draw attention to. But one wonders where the indignation was in the fall of 2002 and spring of 2003, when Cheney was helping to lead America into a war in Iraq that was based on faulty and manipulated intelligence. Back then, the stakes were somewhat higher, the obfuscations were somewhat more sinister - and the consequences proved greater than just a mildly-injured Republican quail hunter.
But few in the mainstream media were much interested in those discrepancies. Former White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer had easier work days during the initial launching of the Iraq War than his successor McClellan has had in the wake of Cheney's accident.
This is ironic, because Cheney's accident - however badly he and the White House mishandled it after the fact - was purely that: an accident. Nobody seriously thinks that the incident was intentional, or even particularly predictable. And Cheney is partially responsible for many, many deaths that were - at the very least - predictable.
Cheney's accidental shooting of Harry Whittington is one of those things that probably could have happened to anyone who spends enough of his time hunting quail. It should not be the heaviest thing weighing on Cheney's conscience, and it should not be the highest priority on the media's agenda.
If the media are interested in demanding explanations or asking tough questions, there are plenty still out there. And many of these have answers that are potentially far more interesting than why Cheney decided not to reveal the shooting until the day after the fact. His decision to delay discussion of the shooting was a product of what it looks like: an enduring commitment to opacity and a willful refusal to deal with the media. There may not be anything more to be revealed by pursuit of this story.
One can only hope that the Cheney shooting flap will somehow jump-start the media's collective blood pressure. Now that they've successfully harassed Cheney into offering a response on this incident, maybe they'll feel emboldened to demand the responses that they - and we - deserve on other, more critical issues.
If not, the incident will beautifully exemplify our nation's severely-limited attention span, and our media's seriously skewed priorities.