Last March, the President of the United States and his First Lady went to Broadway, to see the hit musical Chicago. They were, of course, guests of honour with the best seats in the house, greeted with great respect.
When the lights went down and the show started, they were forgotten for a while amidst the sound, the colour and the movement. Until the show came to a number called All I Care About. A line of sexy, scantily-clad young women declare their devotion to a man called Billy Flynn, a character in the musical. They bump and grind. They lie on the floor and gyrate. And they sing the chorus: "We want Billy/Give us Billy."
As soon as they hit those notes, wave after wave of laughter rolled through the stalls. From every angle, heads turned to look at Bill and Hillary. The name Billy and the sight of young women rolling on the floor in mock sexual ecstasy was just too much to contain. The man who came in as Leader of the Free World had been transformed into Slick Willy. Buried assumptions, secret knowledge, had come to the surface.
The great man in the audience had become a show much more irresistible than anything on stage. Suddenly aware that he was being watched, Clinton leaned over and kissed his wife chastely. This strange but eloquent moment might be seen as prelude to the events of the last 10 days. Surreal as it is, it is also oddly apt. It is a reminder of how quickly, in our media-driven world, where events unfold in real time, the image of a public figure can change.
It suggests the power of unspoken assumptions - in this case the widespread supposition, based on relatively little firm evidence, that Clinton is an inveterate philanderer. And it happens, as this scandal is taking place, in a theatre where the line between truth and invention, audience and actors, is dizzyingly unstable.
Scandals usually come down to a set of straightforward oppositions. Are the allegations true or false? Is the accused innocent or guilty? Is the accusation a search for the truth or a vile smear? Does the behaviour complained of fall into the public or the private domain?
What makes this one so interesting, and so evocative of the state of public consciousness at the end of the 20th century, is that all these oppositions have broken down. The chances are that the answer to the above questions is "both".
Clinton probably is the victim of a conspiracy that amounts to a right-wing coup attempt. Lucianne Goldberg, the literary agent who is at the heart of the affair (she persuaded her friend Linda Tripp to secretly record her conversations with Monica Lewinsky) is a veteran of conservative dirty tricks campaigns.
She impersonated a reporter to spy on George McGovern's Democratic presidential campaign for the Nixon White House. In 1988 she was heavily involved with a book on Chappaquiddick, aimed at destroying Teddy Kennedy's campaign for the presidency.
More recently, she was behind a fictionalised account by Dolly Kyle Browning, a Texas woman who claims to have had an affair with Clinton. And she has been part of the large, batty network of conspiracy theorists who insist, against all the available evidence, that Clinton aide Vince Foster was murdered - the implication being, of course, that the murder was commissioned by the Clintons.
There's a whirlwind of loopiness twirling about these people. In the New Yorker magazine, Goldberg explains the deep motivation of her client Linda Tripp as the disgust of a house-proud suburban matron infuriated by white trash invading her domain: "The carpets were getting dirty.
People were eating at their desks. The White House was the most glamorous thing that had ever happened to Linda, and then she sees this mob come in, in sandals. . . she sees George Stephanopolous slopping peanut butter on crackers, with his feet on the desk and his dirty hair."
PEOPLE who see peanut butter as the end of civilisation as we know it tend not to be blessed with an acute sense of proportion. And the behaviour of the "independent" prosecutor, Kenneth Starr, in reality a right-wing Republican, is truly extraordinary.
In Ireland, for instance, an independent inquiry like Mr Justice Moriarty's into Charles Haughey's finances would never in a million years think of suddenly changing tack and deciding to investigate the former Taoiseach's sex life instead. Yet that is essentially what Starr has done.
Having spent more than $25 million of public money in a fruitless attempt to implicate the Clintons in criminality over Whitewater, he has effectively merged his investigation with the Paula Jones circus.
But the one person who didn't need to be told all this, who has known for a long time that they were out to get him, is Bill Clinton. The conspiracy against him is long-standing, relentless, well-funded and relatively open. He has been reminded virtually every day of his presidency that they're out there, waiting, watching, ready to pounce.
Events like his embarrassment at Chicago last March have reminded him that the public more or less assumes that he cheats on his wife. And yet, although the full truth of the allegations against him is very far from proven, it is clear that he did something he should not have done.
It is simply inconceivable that if the whole thing were a baseless fabrication his response would have been as weak, as cautious and as shamefaced as it has been so far.
And he is also, surely, a man who must know that the old distinction between private and public behaviour is no longer clear cut. He belongs, after all, to the 1960s generation that coined the slogan "the personal is political".
He has emerged from a political milieu deeply influenced by feminism. He knows, at least at an intellectual level, that the relationship between a powerful man and his female employees is not a purely private affair. He knows that, in the workplace, there is a legitimate set of political concerns where words like "exploitation" come into play.
He knows that when a middle-aged boss has sex with a poorly-paid employee whose job is held at his pleasure, questions about the use and abuse of power can never be left outside the door.
If, knowing all of that, he did half of what they say he did, then he is not fit to hold office. For in that case, he has forgotten the most basic thing about his job: that he is there to serve, not to be serviced. What matters about him is not his place in history or his reputation, it is his ability to do something real for the millions of his fellow citizens who desperately need the help of government.
His ambitions for them have always been limited by his overwhelming desire to stay in power. If he put his own gratification before what remains of those ambitions, striding arrogantly into an ambush he knew was waiting for him, then he is just another contemptible failure, hopelessly corrupted by power.