Now, Saddam Hussein, I concede, is the extreme case, and we will hear no more of him in this column. But the idea of his being rehabilitated with the American public fairly soon by the good agency of the American media and the international mull-and-babble industry is not farfetched. That’s the way it happens. As an op-ed editor myself, I have frequently contributed to the process. Not that the publication of some greater or lesser miscreant, piously holding forth on a subject other than his own recent, well-known moral depravities comprises the whole rehabilitation process. It is but a dinky part of it. And it is this process as a whole that interests me. Rehabilitation isn’t quite the right name for it, either. What we are talking about could better go by the Germanic-sounding, but essentially more precise, term of “re-respectable-ization.” It is what scores of fallen American officials are undergoing right now.

I am not just thinking of Richard Nixon, policy analyst, having such a smart trot around the foreign-affairs barnyard, even as more documents are being released about his hostile obsession with Jews and his fun suggestion that his aides break into the IRS some night to steal tax returns he’d like to see. No, the American political landscape is now littered with public persons who are in some intermediate phase of comeback between disgrace and reacceptance, who are alternately being condemned, forgiven, celebrated, consulted and even, in some places and at some final stages, lionized for their notoriety.

There is a huge range here between the seriousness of some of the malefactions that got these people in trouble and the triviality of others. A number of persons who have been hounded and subjected to ridicule and reproach in the past couple of decades in fact really didn’t do much of anything bad. Naturally, they didn’t ever apologize or publicly repent since they felt no need to. But neither, when you study cases, did almost any of the persons whose conduct was really terrible. This is key: repentance plays virtually no part in gaining reacceptance. What does then? I would suggest: the passage of time and the presence of moral confusion. My point is not that we should carry grudges. It is that we have become much more adept at getting people in trouble, unearthing their misconduct and exposing it than we are at knowing what to do then. We read all the lurid stuff, cackle or sigh over it and then just sort of go blank.

We are not close to having any common, consensual standards or attitudes to bring to bear on the fellow we have brought to this low estate. We argue about him among ourselves and drift on to other things. He does six months of community service, writes a book and comes back as a talk-show star who may or may not run for a vacant House seat. The most he has ever said about what he did is that it was poor judgment and silly and he really didn’t know there wasn’t any money in the bank account. What are we supposed to think?

Several answers are offered: (1) That was a long time ago; (2) Well, he also did some good things; (3) What the hell? - meaning, well, we’re all only human and other people have done things, too, and so he did all this. so what? Right now in Washington you can hear people talking this way about public persons as different as John Kennedy, his brother Ted Kennedy, Charles Robb, Clark Clifford and the whole Iran-contra gang, wondering how to accommodate in their minds the quite different lapses all stand accused of. Does one episode justify condemnation? Does chronic misconduct in one area mean a person should not be accorded respect in another? Does any of it - private-life sleaze, ethical corner-cutting or worse in public life - matter if the perpetrator is doing some other public good?

The problem is not just that we have no consistent standards or mechanisms for carefully judging the wide range of behavior we now consider wrong or for penalizing it, we also have neither standards nor mechanisms of forgiveness, no generally accepted series of steps whereby a person can be said to have shouldered responsibility for what he did, paid a sufficient price, set the thing to rights. So, depending on how resourceful they are, some of those who have committed the worst offenses fairly quickly find their way back onto the public stage and not as chastened wrongdoers, either, but as moral challengers of others - as people giving lectures to men and women who never did anything nearly so disreputable as they did. And at the same time, some whose offenses were relatively sparse or modest but who are not so sharp or powerful or driven never quite recover. The first go on TV and the op-ed pages. The others go away.

This is, to my mind, a most unsatisfactory way of doing things. If we, as a society, are going to be so determined in pronouncing people wrongdoers, we should at least have given half a moment’s thought to what we expected of them in the first place and require of them now to expunge the offense. We leave people who have not done all that much wrong in permanent limbo. We lustily welcome back others who are much worse and have declined even to acknowledge their wrongdoing. Such an acknowledgment should surely be the basis of public forgiveness. But almost none of the people who have deservedly fallen from public grace in recent times has taken this step, let alone shown anything that could conceivably be called remorse, as distinct from regret and resentment at being caught. Maybe that’s because they have seen they don’t have to, that the thing will come around again if they just wait.