Remember the fund-raising scandal? That was the really big scandal in Washington last year even if it didn't involve sex.
It was all about coffee mornings in the White House which brought in millions of dollars to the Democrats for the 1996 elections. If you wanted to sleep in the Lincoln bedroom, you paid extra.
The Chinese were brought into it. Was Beijing secretly steering funds to help re-elect Bill Clinton through his one-time pals in Little Rock, such as Charlie Trie and Johnny Chung?
Then there were the fund-raising phone calls from the White House made by President Clinton and Vice-President Al Gore. Did they break a 19th century law forbidding such calls from a federal building?
The Republicans professed deep shock over such abuses of the revered White House which, of course, never happened when Ronald Reagan or George Bush were in charge.
"You must be joking," retorted the Democrats. Everyone does it. Etc, etc...
Well, now the real story is about to be revealed in a massive 1,500page report, the fruit of four months of hearings by the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee, headed by the former Watergate attorney and film star, Senator Fred Thompson.
But is it the real story? The report has been written by the Republican majority members of the committee and, not surprisingly, it is damning for the Democrats. But they have produced a minority report which is damning for the Republicans.
So, was it worth $3.5 million and hours of testimony to discover that the Republicans disagree with the Democrats?
The New York Times, which has seen a leaked version - it will not be published officially until later this month - is trying to stir up interest among a public satiated with alleged White House sex scandals.
In an editorial headed "The Price of Scandal Fatigue" it recalled how Bob Dole, when campaigning against President Clinton as details of the fund-raising abuses were emerging, used to cry to little avail: "Where's the outrage?"
"Anyone reading the Senate investigative report could add a second question. Where's the curiosity?" the newspaper said. The so-called Chinese connection promised to be the most sensational aspect of the report. Senator Thompson set the tone when he opened the investigation, saying that the panel "believes that high-level Chinese government officials crafted a plan to increase influence over the US political process".
But after four months of hearings, no definite proof of this has been produced. One of the problems has been that it was the CIA and the FBI which provided the evidence of Chinese interference through electronic eavesdropping of communications between Beijing and the Chinese embassy and officials in the US. But this evidence is "classified" information which cannot be made public.
The report does assert that leading members of the Riady family, which controls the huge Indonesian Lippo business conglomerate, "have had a long-term relationship with a Chinese intelligence agency". But Mochtar Riady and his son James have also been friends and supporters of Bill Clinton since his days in Arkansas where the Riadys established a bank, and Charlie Trie, incidentally, opened a restaurant which became a favourite of Clinton.
Mr Clinton as President was behind the transfer of a former Riady employee called John Huang to a key fund-raising post in the Democratic National Committee. Make of that what you will. Mr Huang, a US citizen, is lying low after it was revealed that much of the money he raised from the Asian community for the Democrats has had to be returned as illegal.
The report could be more damaging for Vice-President Gore than the President, who does not face any more elections. Mr Gore has been badly caught out for attending a fund-raiser in a Buddhist temple in California.
It is illegal to use religious establishments for political fund-raising, but Mr Gore has tried unconvincingly to say he did not know it was a fund-raiser even though his staff were clearly aware of it.
A long-term associate of Mr Gore, Ms Maria Hsia, arranged for monks and nuns in the temple to be "straw donors" using money from overseas she had "laundered". This is bad enough but the report says: "The committee has learned that Ms Hsia has been an agent of the Chinese government, that she acted knowingly in support of it, and that she attempted to conceal her relationship with the Chinese Government."
For a man who hopes to be the Democratic presidential candidate in 2000, it is not helpful to have a Senate report discussing Ms Hsia's possible links with Chinese intelligence agencies and saying: "Were such alleged intelligence reports to be true, Hsia's long relationship to the Vice-President of the United States would raise grave new questions about the extent to which Chinese intelligence operatives have been able to influence US politics during the Clinton administration."
The White House is calling the report the Republican Party's first press release of the 1998 campaign. If it is any consolation for Mr Gore, Maria Hsia trails well behind Monica Lewinsky in name recognition.