By Paul Farhi
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, November 16, 2007; C01

With his indictment yesterday on charges of perjury and obstruction of justice, Barry Bonds, baseball's greatest slugger, joins an unproud pantheon. If Bonds's legal troubles say anything, they bespeak an old cliche: It's not the crime, it's the coverup.

Bonds hasn't been convicted of anything yet, but his case so far fits a classic template: Party X stands accused or suspected of some malfeasance (in this case, taking steroids and other performance-enhancing drugs to prolong and accelerate his baseball career). After years of angry denials, proclamations of witch hunts, and tantalizing but inconclusive evidence, Party X is ultimately undone by the underlying campaign of active evasion or complicit silence.

In other words, wrongdoers -- being wrongdoers -- have a tendency to dig deeper holes for themselves, amplifying their original misdeeds with sometimes desperate facades of deception. Oh, what a tangled web we weave, etc.

This has been the narrative heart of fiction and drama (see: "Double Indemnity," "Fargo," the underrated "A Simple Plan") and a host of recent high-profile events. Martha Stewart went to prison for five months in 2004 after she was convicted of lying about insider stock trades. Rapper Lil' Kim (Kim Jones) was convicted in 2005 of perjury after she lied to a grand jury about her friends' role in a 2001 shooting (she served a year in prison). Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey Skilling were convicted not for constructing the complicated accounting fraud that sank Enron, but for their efforts to hide it.

Washington, in particular, knows how this one rolls. Several major political scandals of recent vintage have turned less on the basis of who did what to whom than on who lied or dissembled about what.

The enduring formulations may be Richard Nixon's downfall in 1974, which made "stonewalling" a household word, and Bill Clinton's impeachment in late 1998, which turned on his efforts to cover up his affair with Monica Lewinsky.

Clinton's legal troubles overshadowed those of his Housing and Urban Development secretary, Henry Cisneros, who lied to federal agents about the amount -- but not the fact -- of "hush money" he paid to a woman with whom he was having an affair. (Cisneros pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor count of lying to the FBI and was fined $10,000; he was pardoned by Clinton in January 2001.)

Similarly, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby was convicted not of revealing the name of CIA undercover operative Valerie Plame, but of lying to a special prosecutor about his role in the episode (Libby, too, was pardoned).

Olympic gold medal sprinter Marion Jones faces up to six months in prison for lying about her use of steroids, as part of the same investigation that led to Bonds's indictment.

Journalists aren't immune from covering up their wrongdoing. Just ask Janet Cooke, Jack Kelley and Jayson Blair, who maintained for months that their sensational newspaper stories were factual. Stephen Glass, a young writer for the New Republic, went so far as to create a fake Web site to "prove" the existence of one of his many fraudulent sources.

Bonds has been shadowed by allegations that he was covering up drug use for more than a decade. Baseball fans have watched with fascination -- and mounting suspicion -- since the late 1990s as the San Francisco Giants slugger began to pile up record home runs at a time when his production should have been slowing with age. The physical evidence was startling: Bonds, who broke into the major leagues in 1986, seemed to grow muscles before fans' eyes. His massive chest and gunslinger arms, he said, were the result of nothing more than rigorous weightlifting.

The lesson here may be knowing when to cut your losses. When the grand jury began its work, prosecutors offered not to charge Bonds with any drug-related counts if he testified truthfully. Now he faces as many as 30 years in prison.