Lewis “Scooter” Libby, the Chief of Staff for Vice President Dick Cheney, has been indicted for making false statements to authorities investigating the Valerie Plame leak. That’s a serious charge, and if true, Libby deserves to face the consequences. He has already resigned.

While this is serious news for Libby, the investigation has yet to yield the political bonanza that opponents of the Bush Administration had hoped. The Plank, an interesting new blog from the center-left magazine The New Republic, summarizes:

[T]he way Democrats were talking about this case leading up to the indictment, this has to come as a letdown. After all, liberals believed that Patrick Fitzgerald was going to cripple the Bush administration and reveal the lies and deceptions behind the Iraq war. There was speculation that Fitzgerald would shine a bright, unflattering light onto the inner workings of the White House Iraq Group. There was talk that he was going to name a “Constitutional officer”—namely Cheney—as an unindicted co-conspirator. And there were rumors that he was seeking to empanel a second grand jury to investigate who ginned up the fake “Niger documents.”

Maybe Fitzgerald just has a very impressive poker face, but it sure seemed from his press conference that none of those things is now going to happen. Even the talk, earlier in the day, that Rove was now in an excruciating legal limbo seems like it was overblown. The five indictments against Libby appear to be the only indictments Fitzgerald is going to bring. It seems there’s a good chance Rove is off the hook and an even better chance that everyone else is, as well.

We’ll see. I’ve refrained from speculating much on this case because it seems like a good way to guarantee that I’ll be proven wrong in the future.

It is interesting to note that nobody has (yet) been indicted in the original leak. We still don’t know who told columnist Robert Novak that CIA operative Valerie Plame was Joe Wilson’s wife. If the investigation concludes with no indictments for the leak itself, Libby would find himself facing prison for covering up something that wasn’t a crime in the first place.