One measure of a good scandal is that its basic chronology can be re-told as a gripping narrative. (Whitewater? No. Monica-gate? Sort of. Watergate? Absolutely.)

For a while I was worried that CIA-leak-gate, or whatever we now call it, would die simply because it was too hard to shoehorn into chronologic story form — too many characters for Americans to keep track of, too many murky motivations, too much flashing backward and forward required to explain where the scandal occurs and why it’s so scandalous. (“See, the President said this before the war, and then someone else said this after the war, and then Karl Rove might have said this somewhere in-between, and Scott McClellan then said that, and Robert Novack wrote this earlier, but then Matthew Cooper said this later…”)

But this story, from the Sunday New York Times, puts my fears to rest. It’s a great overview of events so far, inspired by what is now a great scandal. The story doesn’t reveal any new details. It just puts what is known into a damning chronology, beginning with the “muggy midsummer Sunday” on which Bush celebrated what was presumably an unhappy 57th birthday…