You may think you know what you’re dealing with, but believe me, you don’t.

—John Huston as Noah Cross, in Chinatown

A great mystery story is like skinning an onion. You peel back the lies and corruption, and expose… another layer of lies and corruption.

Think Progress cites a Time magazine report about how administration officials learned about Valerie Plame:

If these revelations are true, the least of Rove and Libby’s concerns is perjury. Today’s disclosure adds further evidence that the White House consciously dug out Plame’s identity, used it, and then engaged in a massive cover-up by pinning blame elsewhere. Moreover, it appears far more players were involved in this orchestrated, administration-wide effort than previously believed. The key question, if these revelations are true, is why did these administration officials lie so overtly to the special prosecutor? Knowing hard evidence would come out sooner or later against them (through leaks, emails, etc), the White House officials still chose to lie. What could they possibly be trying to hide? Perhaps this wasn’t just a “third-rate smear.”

PERRspectives has a list of senior officials who appear to be implicated in Rovegate or Plamegate or Traitorgate, or whatever you want to call it:

The mushrooming Karl Rove CIA outing scandal increasingly looks like it will rack up quite a body count within the White House. It was only two years ago that President Bush concluded of the Valerie Plame outing, “I don’t know if we’re going to find out the senior administration official.” Now it is beginning to appear that he will have no credible senior officials left.

In politics and business, we use dramatic language to make our little jobs seem bigger and more exciting. We’re constantly “dodging bullets” and “putting out fires,” and scandals rack up “body counts.”

It will probably be twenty years or more before we know what kind of body count was racked up outside the White House. Governments tend to be very protective of their secrets regarding weapons of mass destruction (WMD), Valerie Plame’s specialty as an undercover CIA operative.

When “senior administration officials” blew her cover for the sake of a good political jab, they also blew the cover of the CIA front company that ostensibly employed her. That blew the cover of an unknown number of other undercover operatives. We haven’t heard their names, but you can be certain that foreign intelligence services, who pay very close attention to matters like this, know who they are. Those foreign intelligence services also tend to keep a close watch on the people in their own WMD programs, so they’ve learned who was talking to undercover CIA operatives.

Now we’re talking body counts.