A woman asked Benjamin Franklin in 1787 what the Framers had created at the Constitutional Convention. His reply: ”A republic–if you can keep it.”

Franklin’s words resonate today. Two extraordinary events occurred this week. Both shed light on the health of what the Constitution calls our ”republican form of government.” The first was salubrious (if premature): the release of President Clinton’s videotaped testimony before the Starr grand jury, providing a remarkable opportunity for all Americans to judge whether their president had committed impeachable offenses.

The second event was profoundly disturbing (if unsurprising): The instant reaction to the Clinton testimony by media elites–who style themselves guardians of the Republic, educators of the masses, and tribunes of truth–was little short of decadent.

What mattered most in the Clinton testimony and the other material released this week was not the fresh porn that the press so happily deplored–and what dreary, dull porn it was–but the fresh evidence of his criminality. What mattered was whatever evidentiary light was shed on the question of whether he has committed (and is still committing) impeachable offenses.

This obvious point has escaped the press. It has also escaped much of the public, in part because the press abdicated its claimed educational role while implicitly advocating government by plebiscite. Even respected newspapers reviewed Clinton’s testimony not as evidence but as a theatrical performance. Most barely took note of the powerful proof, witnessed nationwide by the American people, that the president had repeatedly committed one of the most serious crimes charged in Starr’s report: perjury to a criminal grand jury.

Nor was there much said about the probative weight of Clinton’s numerous grudging admissions and evasions that support Starr’s claims that he had lied in his Jan. 17 deposition–after Judge Susan Webber Wright ordered him to answer the questions in the Paula Jones sexual harassment lawsuit–and had encouraged others to lie.

The leitmotif of the coverage was, rather, how well the president had ”performed,” how he had run rings around plodding prosecutors (who would have been panned for disrespect had they not been plodding), how he had confounded media-created expectations that he would rant and rave and storm out of the room.

Consider Tuesday’s Washington Post:

”In an agile four-hour performance, President Clinton repeatedly turned prosecutors’ questions to his advantage,” began an article by Joan Biskupic and Roberto Suro.

”It has happened time and time again throughout Bill Clinton’s political career. Just when he appears most vulnerable, an unexpected bit of luck yanks him back from the brink,” added David Maraniss, Post reporter and prize-winning Clinton biographer.

Applauding the president for thwarting ”misplaced expectations that the tape would do him in,” Maraniss allowed in passing that perhaps ”a close reading of the transcript could reveal points where Clinton was not telling the truth.” But Maraniss seemed far more interested in his view that ”in its totality (the videotape) made Clinton again appear to be a reasonable man struggling to survive in a difficult situation brought on by his political enemies,” and whose ”careful answers . . . were nothing more than an effort to escape the equally manipulative word traps set by his legal adversaries.”

Maraniss did not quote any such ”manipulative word traps.” In fact, there were none. The questions posed to Clinton were pointed and precise–but clear and fair–efforts to corner a determinedly dishonest witness into either telling the truth or telling his lies with sufficient specificity to cut through the word games.

Tom Shales, The Post’s television critic, opined that ”Clinton is beginning to look like the victim of a high-tech crucifixion.” The president ”looked cute” with reading glasses halfway down his nose, Shales noted. Not mentioned was the fact that none of the crucifying questions about sex would have been necessary or relevant had Clinton simply told the grand jury the truth, by admitting that he had lied repeatedly in his Jan. 17 deposition. Instead, Clinton sought to claim that he had been truthful, by eviscerating the meanings of words like ”sex,” ”alone,” and ”is.” This left Starr and his deputies with no choice but to pin him down as specifically as possible.

Lost in the noise was the distinction between a charming rogue and a charming perjurer. One had to turn to The Post’s level-headed editorial page to get a dose of reality: ”The president pretty plainly lied under oath in a court proceeding and repeatedly in public and private thereafter. . . . He sought to disarm in the videotape; the appearance of candor was used to mask the opposite.”

The airwaves, meanwhile, were populated by ”legal analysts,” like CNN’s egregiously biased, dependably wrong Greta Van Susteren, who uttered on Larry King Live Monday night this howler on Clinton’s testimony: ”There was no perjury demonstrated.” Then she parroted one of Clinton’s most ludicrous assertions: ”I mean, is the president obligated to make out the case for Paula Jones’ lawyer?”

The most charitable interpretation of such stuff is that Van Susteren had read neither the Jan. 17 deposition transcript– replete with unambiguous perjuries–nor the Starr report, which provides so-far-unrebutted proof of those perjuries and powerful evidence that Clinton resumed perjuring on Aug. 17.

Was Clinton’s Jan. 17 testimony truthful when he swore that he had had no ”sexual affair” with Lewinsky? Or when he swore, repeatedly, that he had no specific recollection of ever being alone with Lewinsky–who, we now know from her essentially undisputed testimony on this point, had performed oral sex on him 10 times? Or when he swore, in contradiction to his friend Vernon Jordan’s testimony, that he did not know that she had been subpoenaed by the Jones lawyers? Or when he swore, in contradiction to Lewinsky, that he was ”not sure” he had ever discussed with her the possibility that she might be called to testify? Or when he said, ”I don’t recall,” when asked if he had given gifts to her?

All lies, all proved. And contrary to the line trotted out by the Clinton touts, the Jones lawyers’ questions were as clear and unambiguous as could be expected of more-than-competent examiners seeking to pin down the elusive president.

Starr’s prosecutors had to be even more probing. How else to seek the truth from a witness who uttered falsehoods even in his prepared opening statement? A witness who then defended his previous testimony with such nonsense as ”it depends on how you define ‘alone,’ ” and ”there were a lot of times when we were alone, but I never really thought we were,” and ”you seem to be criticizing me because they didn’t ask better questions”?

Instead of admitting his biggest Jan. 17 lie–in denying any ”sexual relations” with Lewinsky–Clinton seized upon a bizarre distortion of the definition of ”sexual relations” that Judge Wright had approved for purposes of the deposition. He claimed on Aug. 17–much to the surprise of Judge Wright, it appears–to have read that definition as excluding receipt of oral sex.

Even Clinton, however, had to admit that if he had ever once touched Lewinsky erotically on her breasts or genitals, the Jan. 17 definition would have applied. Thus were the prosecutors driven to press Clinton on whether he had ever done that. And thus did Clinton, under oath in his grand jury testimony, contradict Lewinsky’s testimony that he had done that, on at least nine different days.

Perhaps anticipating that some would be quick to dismiss this contradiction as ”a he says, she says case”–as has Peter Jennings of ABC News–Starr’s prosecutors had included in their report to Congress both the X-rated, self-corroborating details of Lewinsky’s testimony and the explicit confirmation of those details by seven other witnesses. Lewinsky had told all seven virtually every facet of her sexual contacts with Clinton long before she could possibly have imagined Clinton’s hands-off defense.

Starr would have looked better if he had put the X-rated details in a sealed appendix, and if his report had noted more conspicuously such exculpatory facts as Lewinsky’s testimony that ”nobody ever asked me to lie.” And House Republicans would have looked better had they accommodated Democrats by waiting another week to release the Clinton videotape and the Lewinsky testimony. But Starr’s blindness to appearances and the partisanship of House Republicans (and Democrats too) are not news.

What is news is that the nation saw its president plainly, recurringly, lie under oath to a grand jury. That’s a sad commentary on the health of the Republic. Even sadder is the press’s playing of this event as just another chapter in The Return of the Comeback Kid.