The circus continues its performance, unabated. Former President Donald Trump, as expected, pled not guilty to charges earlier this week stemming from allegations laid out in a federal indictment unsealed last week related to his hoarding several classified national security documents.

The alleged facts, even accounting for a bit of prosecutorial hyperbole in their description, are disturbing. The documents, squirreled away in the bedrooms and bathrooms of his Mar-a-Lago resort, apparently include “information regarding defense and weapons capabilities of both the United States and foreign countries; United States nuclear programs; potential vulnerabilities of the United States and its allies to military attack; and plans for possible retaliation in response to a foreign attack.” These are not memos about why Colonel So-and-so should or should not become General So-and-so, or margin notes on the pros and cons of renaming Fort Bragg. If even half of it is true, it is pretty damning stuff.

Trump, as usual, brought it on himself. It is one thing for him to have had all of this, explicable or not – there may well be a legitimate argument to be made under the Presidential Records Act (though if so, that may be a hole Congress needs to fill) – but it is quite another for the former president to lie and obfuscate about it when those documents were subpoenaed. One recalls the scandal of British Secretary of State for War John Profuma in Britain in the early 1960s. He was engaged in an affair with a 19-year-old model, who just so happened to be engaging in the same activity with the senior naval attaché at the Soviet Embassy. But what got Mr. Profuma disgraced was not the revelation of his extra-marital hobbies, but the fact that he looked his peers in the House of Commons in the eye and said he didn’t do it. Yes, back then lying was grounds for disgrace. That’s really what got Nixon in trouble. It wasn’t until Bill Clinton that lying was reduced to mere public misdemeanor.

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In any case, Trump is owed his day in court, but the facts appear to make it a pretty open-and-shut case. That is not to say there are not pitfalls to indicting the former president. First of all, open-and-shut or not, the trial looks as though it will linger well into 2024 and the upcoming presidential election. How this will play into that is unclear, but we do know it will at best serve as a distraction from the very serious issues that ought to be dissected, and will make the election little more than the next season of a real-time TV drama, starring Donald J. Trump. And everyone should be more than a little uneasy about a precedent being set of a sitting president’s Department of Justice indicting and prosecuting that president’s leading political challenger.

There are few clean hands in this whole sordid episode. Yes, Trump’s reckless disregard for classified material is appalling, possibly criminal, but the Department of Justice’s credibility has been undeniably tarnished. There is, of course, the fact Hillary Clinton did much the same thing, only in electronic form, and escaped any prosecution. But beyond that, it cannot be ignored that, however unhelpful he has been to his own causes, Trump has been unjustifiably targeted in the past, for undeniably political reasons. The entire Russia Collusion debacle was more the stuff of third-world tinpot governments than a mature Western democracy operating on Rule of Law. The blatantly political nature of the New York indictments served mainly to degrade any legitimate case against Trump; and over in the legislative branch, the first impeachment essentially made a mockery out of the process (though the second was legitimate).

Yet for all that, Trump should not be let off the hook, especially by conservatives. One can reasonably point out, if the same standard is to be applied, Hillary Clinton should have been prosecuted, and the ostentatiously political nature of previous legal actions against Trump, without excusing the former president’s atrocious disregard for the law and the security of the nation. Conservatives, by principle and, at least lately, by default, are the political and philosophical defenders of law and order, it’s enforcement, and of the need for, and importance of, robust national security. There are very few Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s left in the Democratic Party, and the few who are left are being drummed out. If Republicans don’t respect the enforcement of law and order and national security, who will?

Trump’s defense is no more credible than Alger Hiss’s was back in the 1950s. Conservatives defended their principles then and should now.

Kelly Sloan is a political and public affairs consultant and a recovering journalist based in Denver.