Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons ought to be read every year by law enforcement . It’s never a bad time to be reminded that lawlessness in the name of “good” is an invitation to evil.

As the old saying goes: The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

This is especially worth bearing in mind as one reads special counsel John Durham’s long-awaited “Russiagate” report, which explores the federal response to the bogus allegation that the Trump 2016 presidential campaign conspired with Moscow to steal the election. The most stunning revelation in the Durham report is this: The FBI, which did more than any group to legitimatize what ultimately turned out to be a falsehood, had good reason to believe Hillary Clinton's campaign in 2016 fabricated the collusion story from thin air. Yet, it went along with it anyway, treating the Kremlin connection narrative as a credible threat.

“Among the most troubling conclusions in special counsel John Durham’s Russiagate report is that the FBI — even as it relied on Clinton-campaign-funded opposition research against Donald Trump that it failed to verify — ignored strongly supported intelligence that Hillary Clinton was intentionally smearing Trump as a Putin puppet,” National Review's Andrew McCarthy explains.

The FBI, McCarthy adds, “and the Obama administration more broadly, did not ignore the intelligence about Clinton’s strategy,” but rather used the law-enforcement and intelligence apparatus of America's government to “knowingly [abet] Clinton’s implementation of the strategy.”

The reactions to Durham’s findings from partisan operatives have been exactly what you would expect. Democratically aligned interests insist there is nothing to see. On the Right, there have been the usual calls for the tree of liberty to be watered and whatnot. Meanwhile, in the middle, there have been more thoughtful and evenhanded responses, including from former Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz, who argues the Durham report is ultimately a story of good people behaving badly.

“The basic conclusions reached by the Durham report [is] that good people have been willing to do bad things in order to prevent Donald Trump from being elected (or reelected) as president,” Dershowitz writes. “These good people honestly believe that the noble (at least in their view) end in ‘getting’ Trump and preventing him from being president justifies ignoble means, including mendacity and violation of long-established principles.”

He adds: “There can be no doubt that the Durham report is correct in having concluded that government officials — from the top down — viewed the evidence (or lack thereof) through the prism of resolving all doubts against Trump and in favor of his opponents. This was not so much a partisan bias, favoring Democrats over Republicans, because some of the worst offenders are Republicans who honestly believe that the Trump presidency endangered the national security of the United States.”

“Many of the people involved in the wrongdoing documented by the Durham report were well-intentioned,” Dershowitz adds. “But they had little understanding of the consequences of their actions.”

But are the lawmen identified in Durham’s report “good” people? Someone who would stretch the spirit of the law to its breaking point in the name of some perceived good can, possibly, be a good and even a moral person. But this type of behavior, violating commonly accepted norms and turning the legal system against individual people for what they may do instead of what they have done, is generally the purview of young hotheads. Youthful passion may be excused. What defense is there for the gray-haired career bureaucrats and lawmen with decades of service under their steadily expanding belts? What excuse is there for those who ought to know better?

Recall the scene from A Man for All Seasons when St. Thomas More explains quite simply to the young hothead Roper why lawlessness in the name of good is a fool’s choice:

The sentiments expressed in this passage, though lovey and timeless, are not exactly groundbreaking. It doesn’t take a philosopher to understand that violating the law in the name of the “good” invites only more chaos and evil, a boomerang effect whereby one’s supposed righteousness creates conditions worse than the ones they sought to resist. Dershowitz himself concedes that those who laid all flat just to “get Trump” have likely caused irreparable damage to their respective institutions.

“[W]hat these well-intentioned people did poses a far greater danger to the rule of law and our constitutional system than anything Trump has done or is likely to do,” he writes. “Their benighted, even if well-intentioned, actions threatened to establish dangerous precedents that lie around like loaded guns, ready for the hand of any tyrant who is ill-intentioned.”

This leads to the consideration of an equally unpleasant likelihood: that grown adults in the federal government, those who swore to uphold and enforce not just the letter but also the spirit of the law, didn't even consider the long-term consequences of their actions. It didn't even occur to them that trading away the credibility and trustworthiness of the entire federal law enforcement apparatus just to stop one man would invite devastating consequences.

Knowing better now about the federal response to the collusion hoax, one is left with the inescapable feeling that this is exactly the case — that they didn’t even consider for a moment the grave ramifications of their actions. All of this is to say: Those who abetted the collusion lie are either too stupid or too dishonest to remain in office. Either they were too stupid to see the obvious downsides to going along with the narrative, or they were “in on it.” Option “A” or option “B,” one is hard-pressed to maintain the belief they are “good” people. Maybe “noble idiots.” That may be the kindest thing we can say of them.

At any rate, for their role in the collusion narrative (despite how they should have known better and regardless of whether their intentions were pure), they must go. Because a lawman who sees the law as a mere exercise in situational ethics, and one who believes it is acceptable to bring the justice system against someone based on what the person may do rather than what the person has done, is no lawman at all. He’s simply a political operative with a badge and a gun. And that’s about as grave a danger to the republic as one ever posed by Trump.

Becket Adams is a columnist for the Washington Examiner and National Review. He is also the program director of the National Journalism Center.