Former President Clinton needs to take a long, long sabbatical someplace far, far away. Jerry Brown's wanderings in the wilderness, after he left the California Statehouse, come to mind: He studied some Buddhism in Japan, ministered to the poor with Mother Teresa in India. Clinton should call Brown's travel agent immediately.

Faced with a new president who's so far humiliating them politically, the last thing the Democrats need is a directionless, undisciplined ex-president who won't go away. Clinton's still reeling from his self-indulgent last day in office. That was one hell of a party he threw Jan. 20, with those 175 pardons and commutations, one last big blast for his friends, his family, his benefactors -- and the GOP.

Republicans are still enjoying Clinton's last-minute bacchanal of bad judgment. Now we have the news that Sen. Hillary Clinton's brother Hugh Rodham pocketed $400,000 thanks to his work on behalf of two well-connected crooks his brother-in-law and golfing buddy pardoned -- Rodham has now returned the money -- while her campaign treasurer worked on behalf of two other felons. The former president says he didn't know Rodham was receiving money from either pardon recipient, though interestingly, he hasn't said they didn't discuss the pardon. Hillary Clinton insists she didn't talk to anyone, neither her brother nor her campaign aide, about the disputed pardons. But as the story gets weirder, who knows what to believe?

Meanwhile, the ex-president digs himself deeper with every attempt to explain what he did, having to correct his claim in Sunday's New York Times that three Republican lawyers, who did some legal work for tax-evader Marc Rich, had backed Rich's appeal for a pardon. It's the Lewinsky scandal all over again, only this one is serious. We've got the same pompous, self-righteous, absolutist language -- "There's not a single, solitary shred of evidence that I did anything wrong" -- a claim that's utterly unbelievable, thanks to its echoes of the disgraceful, finger-wagging "I did not have sex with that woman" speech.

Again, he admits to some bad process, maybe bad judgment, to paying insufficient attention to his aides' advice, to an excess of compassion (remember the cover story that he was "ministering" to the troubled young Lewinsky?) And again, he blames the vast right-wing conspiracy for his troubles. "The Republicans had other plans for me," he says mournfully.

Of course they did. In both scandals, Clinton's poor judgment, especially in light of the way his enemies are out to get him, is astonishing. But the pardon scandal matters in a way the Lewinsky mess never did. Clinton's Oval Office blow jobs made him a bad husband and a tacky philanderer, but had little to do with the job he did as president. His last-minute Oval Office pardons may well, in the end, turn out to make him a bad president, once the eight-year political and moral balance sheet is added up.

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