One of the most difficult concepts to get a handle on in the Clinton perjury scandal is whether his crimes fit into the constitutional phrase "high crimes and misdemeanors."

Our forefathers were a bit vague on that one, don't you agree? Whether they were vague on purpose to keep us from impeaching presidents willy nilly or whether they just got tired by the time they got to that point in the sculpting of a nation and never got around to thinking through the concept is anybody's guess.

Congress has to decide what it means, nonetheless, as it ponders whether to go forward with impeachment proceedings against President Clinton.

I heard on Democratic member of the Judiciary Committee offer this measuring stick: to be impeached, the president must have engaged in conduct that destroyed our constitutional system of government.

That's a bit extreme. If the president destroyed our system of government, he wouldn't be impeached because there would be no other branches of government to impeach him.

The few Democrats who have gathered around the president like a praetorian guard are going to have to at least try to stay within the bounds of sanity. Nobody expects them to be reasonable, just sane.

On a more reasonable note, those on the other side of the issue also are going to have to admit that there is nothing about a sexual dalliance that is impeachable, no matter how much the details may disgust us.

To those who are calling for his resignation, that statement probably seems vapid, because no one involved in this entire process has ever suggested that the presidents adultery is grounds for impeachment.

Yet, the loyalists and the media continue to argue as if someone somewhere were indeed trying to get the president impeached for adultery. They're engaged in a struggle to the death with a straw man.

The question is not whether adultery is impeachable. The question is whether perjury is impeachable. Secondarily, the question is whether the president also engaged in obstruction of justice and subornation of perjury and, if he did, whether those violations are worthy of impeachment.

The most compelling argument that I've heard for impeachment so far is that the president violated his oath of office, in which he promised to uphold the laws and the Constitution of the U.S. By willfully breaking the law, by continually lying and trying to sidestep the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, he made a mockery of the rule of law and therefore is guilty of "high crimes and misdemeanors."

I'll agree that he violated his oath of office. Does that constitute the aforementioned high crimes, etc.?

I think it probably does, but I'm not a member of Congress.

The most compelling argument I've heard against impeachment is that, yes, the president lied under oath, but he lied in a civil deposition about a matter that he had already argued was immaterial, and which the judge in the case later ruled was indeed immaterial. He should be impeached only if he lied about a matter that was substantially material, and not in a deposition but in court, or in testimony for a criminal case.

But very few people who oppose impeachment are bothering to give the matter that much thought. They just keep repeating the mantra: It's his private life, the economy is OK, Kenneth Starr is a maniac, let's move on. If they bother to use any brain power at all, they refer to the cop-out, convoluted definition Clinton wants to use for sex and try to argue that he didn't really lie.

I don't like to state things in quite this way, but I'm sorry. Those "arguments" are just plain stupid. If he didn't lie when he said he didn't have sex with Monica, he lied when he said he couldn't remember whether he had been alone with her and when he said their relationship was not sexual in nature and in a dozen other statements.

I don't really know whether this mess will end with Clinton being removed from office or resigning. I doubt it. I don't even know for sure how I would vote on impeachment.

But I know this: The president is guilty of a crime and he should be punished. He should at least be required to pay back the millions of dollars spent on the investigation after he so adamantly denied the relationship last January.