I guess 3,500 classified documents would be too many to stuff into your clothing if you were a high-ranking government official and wanted to take them home for leisure reading.

Perhaps that explains why this week one of the State Department's most knowledgeable experts on China, Donald Keyser, a foreign service officer with three decades of experience, was sentenced to a year in the hoosegow after these documents were found in his Fairfax County residence. Keyser claimed he had just been "careless." Without the comic touch of stuffing the documents into one's clothing, being "careless" with classified materials is apparently a serious offense. So off to the hoosegow Keyser will go.

The Clinton administration's former national security adviser, Samuel Berger, claimed carelessness too after he was nabbed for taking classified materials home from the National Archives where in 2002 and 2003 he had been preparing to testify before the 9/11 Commission. Among his papers were draft documents, memos, e-mail messages, and handwritten notes, some from the Clinton administration's counterterrorism expert Richard Clarke. These would be very relevant to the commission's deliberations.

Employees of the archives espied the chubby Berger stuffing the documents into his socks. He claimed that he had accidentally mixed the classified papers in with his other papers when he left the archives. Apparently Mr. Clinton's national security adviser was given to carrying his personal papers in his socks. That would be in keeping with the administration's dog-patch ambiance. Carrying an attaché case might have been eschewed as "elitist."

At any rate, in April 2005 Mr. Berger got off, pleading guilty to merely a misdemeanor. He was fined $50,000 and barred from access to the archives for three years. After that, perhaps the archivists will require that he remove his socks before being given classified material, or maybe he will allay the staff's concerns by wearing flipflops.

Yet now Mr. Berger's story has taken a more serious turn. As part of his 2005 plea agreement, Mr. Berger promised to take a lie detector test. He never did. This week in a letter to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, 18 Republican congressmen have asked that the Justice Department proceed with the polygraph testing of Mr. Berger. It is more critical today than it might have been back in April 2005.

This autumn a congressional committee made an astounding discovery regarding the contents of Mr. Berger's socks. The archives had failed to catalogue the materials that they gave him to review. No one aside from Mr. Berger has any idea what he took from the archives. He may have doctored documents. He may have destroyed documents. There have been many distinguished former government officials who lived to write their version of the history they participated in. Sandy Berger is the rare government official who has lived to erase history. A polygraph test might reveal how much history he erased.

Mr. Berger's lawyer, a veteran Clinton smog artist, Lanny Breuer, insists there is no "evidence" that his client did anything wrong. That is classic Clinton obfuscation. Mr. Berger was caught stealing classified documents from the National Archives. For a former national security adviser to do such a thing is without precedent. Mr. Berger is also a proven liar — he turned around and said he did take the documents from the National Archives. All this constitutes "evidence" that Mr. Berger has done something very wrong.

A lie detector test may give us a sense of how much wrong he did. Mr. Berger should live up to his 2005 agreement and take the test. The Justice Department should enforce the rule of law.

Yet as we have seen since the 1990s, there is a peculiar double standard in our country. One very lax and capricious rule obtains for the Clintons and their servitors, and another duly exacting rule for the rest of us. Keyser, though, is among the rest of us. He was a top adviser to Secretary of State Powell — so off to the hoosegow with him. While he is disgraced, Sandy Berger is standing gloriously among us in his stocking feet.

Mr. Tyrrell is the founder and editor in chief of the American Spectator, a contributing editor to The New York Sun, and an adjunct scholar at the Hudson Institute.

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