The big political news of the moment is that Hillary Clinton, while she was secretary of state, conducted the people's business from a private, likely non-secure email account. It was used for everything, as the "New York Times" explained in breaking the story, from foreign affairs to Clinton Foundation enterprises to planning Chelsea's wedding.
Commentary has focused on what all of this says about the Clintons' penchant for secrecy, their habit of skirting the rules and what insiders call their "unforced error" in allowing such an embarrassment to happen.
But that stuff is probably the least interesting of the lessons here. More important is what the current flap says about the tension between the drive for transparency and the instinct for privacy, the way in which government growth has outrun legal limitations, and the irreducible ways in which principles are bound up with partisanship.