That the President of the United States should be standing trial in the ornate 19th-century chamber of the US Senate defending himself against allegations of lying about oral sex is beyond comprehension.
Not just the average person's comprehension. That such a state would come to pass was beyond the powers of prognostication of the most sophisticated political pundits, consultants, observers, lawyers, professors and, not least, the American public.
The business of chirpy, eager and all-too-willing Monica bouncing around the Oval Office was by any account a messy and unfortunate visual, and Mr Clinton's half-truths, evasiveness and finally outright lying before the cameras were wrong and immoral.
But this man and his policies were supported then by a solid 60 to 70 per cent of the American people. Said one man-in-the-street: "We knew he was a hound dog when we elected him."
That same percentage of people in public opinion polls continues to support Mr Clinton today. So how did this happen? How did the opposition Republican Party contest the will of the American people and proceed with an attempt to remove a president? When the conventional wisdom, and even criticism, is that politicians mindlessly follow the polls, why have the Republicans so disregarded public opinion?
It is confounding. Surely it has cost them, and many believe the party itself is committing suicide. A Gallup Poll last weekend showed half of all Americans disapproved of the Senate Republicans' handling of the impeachment matter. Asked what issues were important, Americans put impeachment at No 10 on the list.
The answer to how it could have happened can be found in the utterances of no less a politician's politician than the House Minority Leader, Richard Gephardt. Mr Gephardt, a Democrat who longs to be president himself and a man who carries no affection for Mr Clinton, met women's group leaders several weeks ago. They, coincidentally, are no fans of Mr Gephardt; he is too cautious, too bland, too middle of the road. Declarative sentences are foreign to his tongue.
Eleanor Smeal, president of the Feminist Majority, said Mr Gephardt tried to explain what was going on.
"He said: `You have to understand. This doesn't make sense to any of us because we all think in political terms. This is not about politics. This is about God. The Republican Party has been taken over by religious zealots. They don't care what happens politically. They hate this guy. And they want to take him down even if it hurts them. It is a kind of thinking we don't understand'."
Ms Smeal said Mr Gephardt added that he felt a similar situation had occurred in Iran in the late 1970s, and that most people there had also misjudged the intensity of religious fundamentalism.
Still, there remains the question of how a minority could have forced their views on religious issues so definitively. For that, we have to look at the glum matter of the American election. Since 1970, the voter turnout in non-presidential elections has fluctuated between 37 and 40 per cent. In November just 38 per cent of Americans voted. Contrast that with other countries. As of 1995 voter turnout in 14 European countries was above 70 per cent.
That such a small number of voters control government in the US led to a theory espoused by the Christian Coalition in the early 1990s called The 15 Per Cent Solution. A simple idea, it is merely that with low voter registration and turnout, a mere 15 per cent of the population can control the outcomes of elections. And in fact, that is what the Christian Coalition has done, slowly and steadily, through the 1980s and 1990s.
Building on the steady growth and involvement of the religious right in electoral politics, Patrick Buchanan, a former Nixon speechwriter, a conservative writer and frequent presidential candidate, stunned the 1992 Republican convention with a bold speech.
"There is a religious war going on in our country for the soul of America," he declared. "It is a culture war, as critical to the kind of nation we will one day be as was the Cold War itself." It was indeed a speech that would have seemed more apt emanating from Tehran rather than Texas. The problem, as the Democrats and Mr Clinton now see, was that the pundits failed to take Mr Buchanan as seriously as they should have.
By 1994, a survey by Campaigns and Elections magazine found that the Christian right dominated Republican organisation in 18 of the 50 states.
By 1996 the leaders of the Christian right were warning Republican Party leaders they would face election opposition in their districts unless they ceded wholeheartedly to the Christian Coalition's agenda: firm opposition to abortion even if the mother's life was in danger; taxpayer-subsidised funding for private school education in Christian schools; opposition to government funding for the arts.
Paul Weyrich, a seminal figure in the Christian right, issued these warnings to Newt Gingrich, Trent Lott, now leader of the Senate, and Tom Delay, a congressional leader who strongly advocated impeachment, during a private meeting in August 1996, according to a reporter from Ms magazine.
This same cast of characters now forms part of the core group leading the campaign to convict Mr Clinton. His opposition to almost all aspects of the Christian right's political agenda has landed him in the spot, almost as much as his ill-advised dalliance with Ms Lewinsky.
Those who would count their chickens now, who would say Mr Clinton is in no danger because the Republicans cannot muster the two-thirds majority required to convict him, would do well to recall the past. It is by underestimation, by the pundits and the public, that the Christian right has been able to accomplish so much.
In fact, they have just begun.