Welcome to Monday, and welcome to a front-page story in The Washington Post that will catch you up on the issue we were blogging a blue streak about over the weekend: A juicy new Newsweek report, complete with leaked email, that further illuminates Karl Rove’s actions in the days leading up to the illegal outing of a CIA operative.

People keep asking me why this story is a big deal, other than the joy it would bring Democrats if Rove ended up being led out of the White House in handcuffs. The big picture is this: The Bush administration used flawed justifications for going to war with Iraq, and when a credible critic of one of those flawed justifications came forward, sources within the administration moved to punish him by outing his undercover-CIA-agent wife, whose career as an undercover agent was then ruined. Blowing a CIA agent’s cover is a federal crime, and many people now believe one of the vengeful administration sources who blew her cover was Rove, though there are a lot of legal semantics involved in this story and he is denying it, sort of, as The Washington Post notes.

My dad keeps asking me where he can find the blogs that have been parsing all the nuances and legalese involved here. The best ones that I know about are huffingtonpost.com, americablog.org, and dailykos.com, and between the three of them they can generally be relied on to link to any other blog that has a good bead on the story on any particular day.