Could it be that Monica is the best thing that ever happened to Bill Clinton? No, not because of the sex.

Through her and Clinton's myriad other misdeeds, the nation acquired scandal fatigue, immunizing him from accountability for further misconduct. What a perfect backdrop for selling out our national security to the Chinese communists with impunity.

Just two short weeks after the publication of the Cox Report on this administration's incestuous relationship with its Chinese benefactors and their resulting theft of our nuclear technology, Chinagate is already quietly hovering over the media's back burner.

Rep. Curt Weldon delivered an eye-opening address before Congress to highlight just a few of the alarming revelations of the Cox Report that have received precious little media attention, but which deserve an abundance of ours.

First, Weldon confirmed what we suspected all along: While the administration was purportedly reviewing the report for security reasons (for the benefit of the nation), it was actually engaging in damage control by preparing a rebuttal to the report (for the benefit of Bill Clinton).

The administration purposefully leaked and spun details from the report months before it was released to the public. On Feb. 1, four months before responding to Congress with its security concerns, National Security Adviser Sandy Berger issued a detailed statement to select members of the Washington media specifically responding to the 38 recommendations of the committee that were still classified.

Secretary of Energy and White House flack Bill Richardson has continued the spin operation, apparently not content to rely solely on the Kosovo campaign as a decoy. He brazenly contended that "these problems didn't happen under the Clinton administration. They happened under previous administrations."

Weldon, by summarizing just a minute portion of the evidence, exposed Richardson's statement for the shameless lie that it is. A portion of his summary focused on the consistently regrettable activities of former Energy Secretary Hazel O'Leary. Here are a few of the facts Weldon underscored:

• Shortly after O'Leary was appointed in 1993, she abandoned the long-established practice of requiring people to wear color-coded IDs in order to acquire access to our labs. She discarded the system, saying that color-coding was discriminatory. How's that for a jolt of mindless liberalism? (As a footnote, the administration reinstated color-coding a few weeks ago.)

• O'Leary decided that FBI background checks were also unnecessary for access to our labs and thus dispensed with them in at least two of our labs. This allowed lab access to untold numbers of people, not just Chinese or Asian nationals.

• In 1993 or 1994, a retired employee of the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory was accused of releasing sensitive and classified information. He was penalized with a removal of his access to classified information. Amazingly, O'Leary overruled the Oakland office of the Energy Department and reinstated the retiree's classification status.

• Someone in the Energy Department leaked the design of the W-87 nuclear warhead to U.S. News and World Report, which exhibited the good patriotism of publishing a design-revealing diagram of the weapon in its July 31, 1995, issue. Reportedly, the Energy Department's internal investigation to determine who was responsible for the leak was stopped dead in its tracks because it was discovered that the person responsible for the leaks was none other than O'Leary.

• Despite Richardson's assurances that the security problems have been remedied, to this day there are no controls on e-mails that are being sent out of our labs.

• The public has been made aware of less than 1 percent of what the FBI and CIA know about the linkages between PLA front organizations, front companies and financing mechanisms.

Knowing what we do about Bill Clinton's character and his unquenchable addiction to power, it is more than reasonable to conclude that there is linkage between Red China's illegal support of Clinton and his singular negligence (and probably worse) in virtually donating our nuclear secrets to her.

Even if Clinton enjoys defacto immunity for his malfeasance in office, for the sake of the nation we must get to the bottom of this scandal. The Cox Report does not go far enough in connecting the dots.

The committee members were so obsessed with maintaining a spirit of "bipartisanship" that they failed to draw the conclusions that needed to be drawn. The evidence is there.

Bipartisanship does not mean candy-coating the evidence to make it politically undamaging to the Democratic administration. It means putting the nation's interests above party. It is time for Democratic leaders to put into practice their lofty rhetoric of bipartisanship. They need to cooperate with Republicans in forcing this reckless administration to come clean.