The phoniest notes of the last few weeks have been the Capra-esque groaners about how this whole process reaffirms the strength of our system, the functioning of which, we’re told, triumphs over even the most bitter partisanship. In Friday’s New York Times, Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe paints a picture of the impeachment trial as “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.” Most of the people I know have felt like they’ve been watching “The Wrong Man,” Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 film (a true story) in which Henry Fonda plays a nightclub musician accused and nearly convicted of a string of hold-ups he didn’t commit. Tribe ends his piece by saying of Clinton’s acquittal, “I believe history is more likely to view it as a verdict that kept the Constitution’s process of impeachment and removal intact so that they might serve their crucial mission if and when we face a genuine threat of tyranny.”

Yes, but as in the Hitchcock film, the more pertinent point is that a trumped-up accusation was able to proceed without any violation of constitutional process. “The Wrong Man” turns on the moment when a juror is so eager to convict that the judge has no choice but to declare a mistrial. Fonda is freed by a fluke: He’s out on bail awaiting a second trial when the real thief is caught. Clinton’s fate turned on the public’s perception of the basic unfairness of the proceedings against him, a perception that a majority of representatives and a not-insignificant number of senators were willing to ignore. The terrifying thing about how close we came to a right-wing nullification of two presidential elections is that it was all done in the guise of democracy by elected officials so bull-headed they called the very name House of Representatives into question.

Still, there are at least two things to celebrate here. One is the apparent self-destruction of the right wing and its willingness to take the entire Republican Party down with it. The other is something that would have seemed unthinkable a year ago when the Monica Lewinsky story broke: the relative sophistication of the public’s insistence that private sexual behavior is not a gauge of how well an elected official does his job.

As always when it comes to America and sexual morality, what’s going on here is complicated. Alongside Clinton’s high approval rating and the majority’s belief that he should remain in office has been an equally high disapproval of his behavior. Those high numbers may be partially due to the impossible ambiguity of the question “Do you approve or disapprove of the president’s behavior?” What behavior is it referring to? The allegations of perjury and obstruction of justice, or Clinton’s dalliance with Lewinsky? And if it’s the latter, just what do people disapprove of, that he cheated on his wife, or that he fooled around with an intern considerably younger than he was?

But I think the real reason for the strength of both Clinton’s approval ratings and the disapproval of his behavior (which I take to mean his sexual behavior) has to do with what some commentators have rightly maintained is the way the public recognizes its own shortcomings in Clinton. There are plenty of people who’ve strayed in their own marriages and know that it’s still possible to love your spouse, who don’t think of themselves as bad people and who believe that whatever happened is their own damn business. But even those people still feel a need to maintain the expected public stance that holds that good people just don’t fool around. It’s not that the public is incapable of both disapproving of Clinton’s behavior and deciding that it doesn’t warrant removal from office. It’s that Americans tend to be more direct than that — if they were truly disgusted at what he did, Clinton would be gone.

What’s being played out here is the classic disjunction between what Americans know about sex and the chaos it wreaks, and what they allow themselves to acknowledge. What was being played out by Dianne Feinstein and the other Democratic senators pushing for censure — even with acquittal an inevitability — is exactly what Phil Gramm characterized it as: covering their asses. While we largely have the prudish zealotry of the Republicans to thank for Clinton’s acquittal (as well as their own hara-kiri), one of the most troubling aspects of this whole process has been how even Democrats have accepted the assumptions of the right about what constitutes morality.

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Just think of the look of constipated conscience that Joseph Lieberman seems unable to wipe off his puss, or the stentorian tones affected by the Foghorn Leghorn of Senate tradition, Robert Byrd. (How, a friend of mine recently wondered, do the journalists who interview Byrd keep from laughing in his face?) Referring to Lewinsky, both the left and the right have often sounded like outraged Victorians defending imperiled maidenhood. (Almost no one has mentioned the sexism inherent in treating an adult woman — even a young one — as though she were a child offered candy if she’d get into a stranger’s car.) Even among the most vocal of Clinton’s defenders, and some of the most eloquent under fire, like the Democrats on the Judiciary Committee, there were frequent references to how appalling and reprehensible his behavior was. I suppose they had to refer to the affair somehow. But the president had already given them the perfect phrase during his grand jury testimony: “the most mysterious area of human life.” Despite Clinton’s undeniable caddishness in referring to Lewinsky as a stalker, I keep coming back to what his voice and manner betrayed as he spoke of the affair during his testimony, as something he remembered fondly, something he refused to turn into political capital by taking the opportunity to heap loathing upon it.

But that is exactly what Democrats have done by talking about how crucial it is for the Senate to censure the president. Feinstein does not strike me as a stupid woman. But I listen to her calling for censure and I want to grab her and ask, Don’t you get it? Don’t you see that this willingness to make political judgments on the morality of private behavior is what got us into this mess in the first place? But apparently neither she nor any of the Democrats who supported her move to censure understand that. Partly, it’s a function of their position. They are adopting the same public stance as the Americans who tell pollsters that they disapprove of what the president did. They think this affirmation of conventional good/bad morality is what’s expected of them. But they need to listen to what’s underneath the poll numbers expressing disapproval, they need to hear people struggling to find a way to reconcile the truth of their experience with their social disguises.

It made perfect sense that Clinton’s brief remarks following Friday’s votes were directed to the public. They have really been the only parties communicating over the course of the last 13 months. Many in Congress and the press have simply ignored what the public has been telling them, or taken it at face value, which (especially for a journalist) amounts to the same thing. For me, the moment that summed this up better than any other occurred last Sunday on CNN’s “Reliable Sources,” when Newsweek’s Ann McDaniel talked about how Clinton didn’t reach out to the power structure when he arrived in Washington and thus didn’t find too many supporters when he got in trouble. There was a blissful arrogance in McDaniel’s reduction of Clinton’s support to Washington’s movers and shakers. The patent absurdity of talking about the lack of support for a president with a 70-percent approval rating didn’t occur to McDaniel. If it had, the entire concept of politics as an exclusive club would have come crashing down around her, and in much of the press (like the gasbag indignation that has wafted off the New York Times editorials for months now) there is simply no indication that that’s going to happen.

No matter how trivial its origin, the meaning of the Clinton impeachment trial was finally anything but. It presented us with a vision of just how easily we might be cut out of the political process. And now, with talk about the public’s short memory already a staple of punditspeak, we’re being told in effect: “OK, you’ve had your time in the spotlight, things have turned out the way you wanted them, but we all know that you’re so shallow that none of this is going to mean squat a few months down the line, so why don’t you just get out of the way and let us go back to writing you out of the equation.” A stale air of desperation had crept into the debate long before Friday, whether in the House managers’ lining up to don their martyr’s robes or the seen-it-all insider stance that press commentators have fallen back on when it became clear that they couldn’t predict the public’s reaction. There’s a sense that the party has moved on without them, leaving them all bathed in flop sweat.

By Monday afternoon the progress of events pointed in two contradictory directions. On the one hand, there was increasing talk about different witnesses the House might want to call, and 10 Senate Republicans sent a list of 10 new questions to the president. But behind the scenes, Republicans seemed increasingly anxious for a deal. Senate sources told Salon late Monday that even a majority of the Republican caucus is now, privately, looking for a way to avoid witnesses. The only question is how a deal will be fashioned and which Republicans will provide the crucial votes to make it stick.

The trial proceedings livened up measurably Friday when scripted presentations gave way to questions from the senators. The new phase actually brought an air of uncertainty to what might happen. At one point House manager Asa Hutchinson leapt to his feet to object to a question from Sen. Barbara Boxer. Every one in the chamber broke into laughter when Chief Justice William Rehnquist, clearly caught off-guard, looked around for a moment and then asked if a manager was even allowed to object to a question in the first place.

You had to feel sorry, though, for Ed Bryant, the first House manager to speak on Friday. Ever since the White House’s strong finish the day before, the managers had been smarting out loud about how unfair it was that they had no chance to rebut the White House case. So the first question of the day, from the Republicans, simply asked the House managers whether there was anything in the White House presentation that they would like to rebut — obviously coordinated by House and Senate Republicans. But just before the question was asked, Rehnquist announced that he would limit answers to five minutes (a limit he rarely enforced). Bryant clearly thought he was going to have a half-hour or so to rail against the president’s case. He ended up racing off an incoherent speech that was probably a shambles of the presentation he meant to give.

But the real drama — and the real blow to the House managers — came a few minutes after 3 p.m. on Friday. A staffer came walking through the press gallery handing out photocopies of a press release from Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., and warned us not to rush out of the gallery as soon as we read it. This got a chuckle — such press releases rarely merit reading, let alone reporting — but it turned out to be a big deal. Byrd was announcing that he’d be voting to dismiss the charges against the president. Soon the same press release was making its way around the Senate floor.

Byrd has been the most overwatched Senator in the entire impeachment trial. Earlier in the month, he had pundits swooning when he condemned the president’s post-impeachment “rally” as an example of “shameless arrogance.” But Byrd is important because everyone has such an outsized impression of him. And he is known to hold the president, personally, in deep disdain. He had conspicuously held open the possibility that he could be persuaded to vote to convict Clinton. Every possible scenario for the president’s conviction required that Byrd vote to convict, and bring along a dozen of his Democratic brethren by sheer dint of his leadership. When Byrd announced he’d vote to dismiss the charges, it meant that not one Democrat would break ranks; and the Republicans knew it.

Byrd’s announcement left the managers, and a lot of Republican senators, really pissed off. I saw Rep. James Rogan coming down one of the stairwells with a gaggle of reporters, griping about Byrd and asking why he couldn’t have waited at least until the day’s presentations were over. Clearly, Byrd’s announcement crystallized the steady erosion of support for a full-length Senate trial.

But it only confirmed a more pervasive shift in the mood of the proceedings: They had become a distinct embarrassment to the Senate, especially to Republicans. Later that evening one Republican insider told me how a number of the marquee “moderate Republicans” from last month’s House impeachment fight had called him and told him they never would have voted to impeach if they had known it would come to this. Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, was proposing that the trial merely be adjourned with the Senate voting to “acknowledge” the House’s vote to impeach the president. By the evening, it seemed clear that the only question left wasn’t whether the trial would end, but how it could be ended with everyone allowed to save face.

But the House managers came back on Saturday with a bold new sortie: They had gotten independent counsel Kenneth Starr to invoke her immunity agreement in order to compel Monica Lewinsky to be interviewed by them. (More than one pundit called it a Hail Mary pass.) In private, of course, Democrats concede that they’re quick to depict Republican moves as partisan or shady. But the attempt to bring in Starr to lean on Lewinsky, just as the possibility of witnesses seemed to be fading, caused genuine surprise and even some real outrage on the part of Senate Democrats. Senators who had kept their comments measured and cool let go with words reminiscent of last year’s fight in the House.

On Saturday, Tom Daschle told Salon, “They don’t get it. They can’t help themselves. They have so much venomous hatred towards the president that they’re on this path of self-destruction that will lead them ultimately, I think, to an extraordinary demise.” Daschle’s comments echo a frustration that is heard often on the Democratic side of the aisle. With polls showing the Republicans taking a terrible beating for prolonging the impeachment trial, Democrats are thinking to themselves: How long and how hard do we have to beg them not to adopt a course that will do them immense political damage?

Of course, some Senate Republicans are looking for a way out. Sen. Trent Lott had floated a proposal to skip over the divisive motions to dismiss and to call witnesses, in order to cut straight to a vote on the two articles of impeachment, but he was attacked by his own caucus. On Monday Lott decided to take a different tack, joining with nine other Republican senators to send Clinton 10 questions about the matters at hand, but no one was expecting the president to reply.

Lott also made it clear that the Republicans had the votes to defeat the Byrd motion to dismiss, and that they intended to do so. “We have the votes, I believe, not to dismiss it at this point,” Lott told the Associated Press Monday. “I think that is a short-circuiting of the process that would not be fair. The American people would not agree with that.” (Actually, given the state of the public opinion polls, if the Democrats could get Lott to say that under oath, they could probably get him for perjury.)

By Monday morning, it was clear that efforts to reach a compromise that would let the Senate forego both a vote on dismissal and on witnesses had failed. The Senate took up Byrd’s resolution to dismiss the charges against the president and bring the trial to a halt. White House lawyers and House managers made their respective cases for and against the resolution; but even while they were doing so, attention was shifting toward the upcoming vote on whether to depose witnesses — the decision that is quickly shaping up to be the decisive vote of the trial. Over the weekend, four to six Senate Republicans indicated they would vote against calling witnesses; Democrats only need a half-dozen defections to put that issue behind them.

Monday ended with a vote, not on the resolution to dismiss, but on whether to set aside the Senate impeachment rules dictating that deliberations be held in closed sessions. After this resolution went down, 57-43, the Senate reconvened in executive session to debate Byrd’s motion to dismiss the charges.

The behind-closed-doors discussion was appropriate, symbolically at least, because that’s where all meaningful discussions about how to end the trial are now taking place. There is still a possibility that the trial could conclude by the week’s end. But this scandal has always moved by its own distinct logic. As the pressures inside the Republican camp grow more intense, expect a long week of confusing, erratic decisions on both sides of the aisle, with more plot twists to come.