Michael Kinsley and the editorial page of The Washington Times aren’t often in agreement. So it’s not exactly shocking that Kinsley and the newspaper differ on whether President Bush should have commuted Scooter Libby’s prison sentence. The surprise is that Kinsley’s in favor of commutation and The Washington Times is against it.

The commutation “is neither wise nor just,” the newspaper says in its editorial. “It is clearly within the president’s executive powers, but that is beside the point.” The editorial concludes:

Perjury is a serious crime. This newspaper argued on behalf of its seriousness in the 1990s, during the Clinton perjury controversy, and today is no different. We’d have hoped that more conservatives would agree. The integrity of the judicial process depends on fact-finding and truth-telling. A jury found Libby guilty of not only perjury but also obstruction [of] justice and lying to a grand jury. It handed down a very supportable verdict. This is true regardless of the trumped-up investigation and political witch hunt. It is true regardless of the unjustifiably harsh sentence.

Had Mr. Bush reduced Libby’s sentence to 15 months, we might have been able to support the decision. Alas, he did not.