Things fell apart a few years back, when it came to light that hyper-paranoid former Bureau boss J. Edgar Hoover was harboring a mighty big skeleton in his closet — a flapper dress and a feathered boa, actually. Ironic, isn't it? After 48 years of corruption, after digging into the affairs of every American who ever exhibited the slightest deviation from Hoover's notion of the norm, the one thing that finally cost the FBI its credibility was a pair of size-13 pumps. But it's true, and ever since that bit of news broke, just about nothing has gone right for what was once the world's premiere crime-fighting organization.

There was Ruby Ridge and Waco. There was Filegate, as big an embarrassment to the Bureau as it was to the Clinton Administration. And there's the FBI crime lab, so discredited by a Justice Department report on its incompetence that Tim McVeigh used it as one of his main points of defense in his bombing trial. The problems go much deeper; check out this month's Nation magazine cover story on the "B," as the agents call the Bureau. Pack a lunch — it's a long article.

Mainly, though, it was a pair of explosions last summer that made clear the inevitability of the FBI's demise. TWA flight 800 blew up off Long Island over a year ago, and since that time Pierre Salinger working alone seems to have learned more about what caused it than all the G-people together. (Well, ok, maybe Pierre's a bit off course.) And the persecution of Richard Jewell in the wake of the Olympic Park bombing was shameful, if not criminal; if that doesn't bring down the Bureau, perhaps nothing will. The bottom line is, things are pretty damn bad when the most credible agents in the FBI are a couple of fictional UFOlogists on Fox.

I imagine they'll bug my phone for this. At least, I imagine they'll try.