Maryland prosecutors properly dropped charges of felony wiretapping against Linda Tripp last Wednesday, saying a judge’s decision to limit testimony by Monica Lewinsky had gutted their case against the Pentagon staffer. The next day, the Pentagon’s inspector general released a report finding that two Defense Department public affairs officials violated Ms. Tripp’s privacy by releasing information from her personnel file to a reporter.

Defense Secretary William Cohen promptly scolded the two spokesmen for breaching the confidentiality of personnel records — after Ms. Tripp asserted in early 1998 she had a clean criminal record, they provided The New Yorker with information from her file about her arrest as teen-ager for larceny and subsequent conviction for loitering — but beyond that scolding, the matter was closed.

Or not. Ms. Tripp has filed a civil suit against the Defense Department over the release of the information. Oklahoma Sen. James M. Imhofe, who has called for the spokesmen to be fired and prosecuted, denounced Secretary Cohen’s response as a “whitewash and cover-up.”

Meanwhile, an Associated Press story asserted that The Scandal That Wouldn’t Die is finally succumbing. The president, a snag over his Arkansas law license aside, enjoys substantial, if fading, popularity. The first lady is on the brink of becoming a senator. Kenneth Starr is settling comfortably into private life. Monica Lewinsky is doing quite well hawking purses. But the Scandal, clearly, is not dying. It is merely trickling down in search of the right scapegoat, a person or persons at a level comfortably low enough so that someone pays without the price being too dear.

It was going to be Linda Tripp. The argument over whether she is a sneaky tattletale or a patriotic whistleblower was supposed to be irrelevant compared with the larger point that it is against the law to tape phone conversations without the other party’s knowledge. Without the other party’s testimony, it’s a tough case to make.

So now the weight falls upon those two Pentagon spokesmen, Kenneth Bacon and Clifford H. Bernath. In a parallel to that tattletale/whistleblower conundrum, Mr. Bacon says he leaked from Ms. Tripp’s confidential file in order to strike a balance between open government and privacy protection.

Ms. Tripp certainly is entitled to her day in court, but it’s not likely to be a happy one: The Justice Department in April declined to seek prosecution against the two spokesman, saying there was insufficient evidence to prove they knowingly violated the Privacy Act of 1974. That makes Sen. Imhofe’s call for prosecution little more than wishful thinking.

From what started as a national crisis about perjury by a president and overzealousness by a special prosecutor, it’s now down to whether a couple of Pentagon PR flacks leaked when they should not have. Perhaps the Department of Defense is the appropriate final resting place for the Scandal That Wouldn’t Die. All that remains is for someone to organize a firing squad.