We don't usually include the entire text of articles or editorials on the blog, but today we're making an exception for an editorial in The New York Times:

Mark Foley fled his seat in the House of Representatives last September when his sexual approaches to teenage pages finally reached the news media after years of a shameful cover-up in the halls of Congress. Now it turns out that the F.B.I. was just as phlegmatic about the scandal as Mr. Foley’s Republican colleagues. An inspector general’s report excoriates F.B.I. agents for brushing aside “troubling” evidence of the lawmaker’s flirtatious message-writing, and then falsely blaming their inaction on the watchdog group that tried to alert the government in the first place.

The report underlines the calculated indifference at the heart of the scandal. In their final hours in power, the Republicans who controlled the ethics committee issued a report that whitewashed the fact that key members of the Republican leadership and their staff members were aware of Mr. Foley’s long predatory history. The F.B.I. inspector general’s report showed the same indifference among law enforcement officials charged with investigating Mr. Foley’s actions. The report describes one F.B.I. supervisor who said he had read Mr. Foley’s e-mail notes and thought, “What a freak,” but who had then sent the evidence on a fruitless bureaucratic roundabout.

The lug-headed consensus was that there had been no real crime, when — as the inspector general pointed out — agents should have been urgently alerting the page program’s supervisors.

When the scandal finally became public, the F.B.I. falsely claimed that a watchdog group — Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics — had been uncooperative and withheld vital information. In truth, it had been entirely forthcoming in passing on full details from a former page who had complained about Mr. Foley’s lewd predilections.

The new Congress voted to overhaul protections by mandating that an oversight board of surrogates be enlarged to include a former page and a page’s parent. It will have an even balance of House members to end the majority control that helped bury the Foley scandal. The F.B.I. had better take stock, too, and treat Congress with less wariness.