The suspense is finally over.

Lewis "Scooter" Libby, the vice president's chief of staff, was indicted last week on charges of obstruction of justice, false statements and perjury in the Valerie Plame case.

Libby is charged with lying to FBI agents and the grand jury by telling them he learned Plame's name from the press. Special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald charges that it was Libby who spread her name to reporters.

But this case is much bigger than who outed a glamorous undercover agent. It lays bare the White House determination to discredit anyone who punched holes in its rationale for war.

The Plame case is a bizarre tale of White House pettiness with enormous ramifications. Plame was apparently targeted to get back at her husband, Joe Wilson, a former diplomat who had challenged White House claims about Iraq's prewar nuclear program. For this reason, she was considered "fair game," in the immortal phrase of the president's close aide, Karl Rove, who remains under investigation in the case.

To reprise the history of the case: In February 2002, the CIA dispatched Wilson, an Africa expert, to Niger. His task: to investigate the story that the Niger government had sold uranium to Iraq in the 1990s. The White House wanted to use the Niger story to buttress its case that Saddam Hussein had restarted his nuclear weapons program.

Wilson reported back to the CIA that he doubted any uranium had been sold to Iraq. Independent of his report, the CIA and the State Department repeatedly raised questions about the veracity of intelligence on Niger — including British intelligence. In October 2002, CIA Director George Tenet warned the president off referring to African uranium in a speech.

Yet President Bush cited the Niger claim in his 2003 State of the Union address, in the now infamous "16 words." He used the claim as a key argument for an Iraq war, attributing it to the British.

By March 2003, the documents on which the Niger charges were based were revealed to be crude forgeries, passed to the CIA by foreign sources. Post-invasion controversy grew over whether the administration had manipulated intelligence about weapons of mass destruction or used specious evidence.

In May 2003, Wilson fueled the controversy with leaks to the media about his trip to Niger. On July 6, he published an op-ed in The New York Times titled "What I Didn't Find in Africa." Shortly after it ran, the administration admitted the uranium claims had been mistaken. Then came the retaliation against Wilson for showing them up.

On July 14, 2003, syndicated columnist Robert Novak wrote that "two administration officials" told him Plame was behind Wilson's trip to Niger. (He called her an "agency operative," which means undercover agent.) The implication was that Wilson's trip was a case of nepotism.

CIA sources tell the media that Wilson was picked by senior CIA officials, not Plame. Wilson confirmed this version to me in an interview. But the issue of who chose Wilson is a red herring.

The point of the Plame affair is that a covert operative was outed to get even with her husband. The indictment says Libby, Vice President Cheney and an unnamed undersecretary of state (John Bolton?) conferred about Wilson and his wife in May-June 2003.

Fitzgerald is apparently unable to prove that White House officials knew Plame was an undercover spy (rather than an analyst), which would make her outing a criminal offense. It's hard to believe Libby didn't get this information when he queried the CIA about the Wilsons.

It's also hard to believe that Cheney didn't learn Plame's status when he discussed her with Tenet, in June 2003, and then with Libby. Can we believe Cheney wasn't told of her status by the CIA chief?

Fitzgerald stressed at a news conference that Libby's alleged perjury has thwarted discovery of which officials did leak Plame's status. In fact, the whole Plame affair is about White House reluctance to provide accurate information on issues linked to the Iraq war.

There was plenty of evidence that the Niger uranium story was false before the 2003 State of the Union address. But the White House didn't want or seek to know it. The FBI has yet to complete its investigation into the Niger forgeries (even as the Italian press claims they were passed on by Italy's military intelligence service).

The charges against Libby imply that the White House is still stonewalling in the Plame case. But, as with the Niger forgeries, the real story is bound to come out.