HAS STARR GONE TOO FAR?

The longer Ken Starr chases Bill Clinton, the more the independent counsel comes to resemble his quarry. Like the President, Starr is developing a tendency to get a little momentum going, then do something to trip himself up. Last February, for instance, he told a federal judge that he had received important new information from the Clintons' former business partner Jim McDougal on a key portion of the investigation. Nine days later, Starr announced that he was abandoning the Whitewater probe to become a California law-school dean. (A chorus of jeers forced him to reconsider.) And in a major victory last week, he won the Supreme Court's tacit approval to go rifling through the notes of White House lawyers--then was again upended by his own poor judgment. The embarrassment came when the Washington Post reported that Starr investigators seemed to have strayed from the probe's central mission by questioning Arkansas state troopers about women with whom Clinton may have had extramarital affairs when he was Governor. The investigators also tracked down some of the alleged girlfriends to interview them directly.

For a prosecutor coming off a Supreme Court victory, this was like being blasted with a Super Soaker while strolling in his best suit. Starr immediately denied that he was probing Clinton's personal life and defended his use of "well-accepted law-enforcement methods" to identify witnesses who may have been close enough to Clinton to know whether he's been truthful in his sworn accounts to Starr. But it was hard to square that rationale with some of the questions the troopers say Starr's agents were asking, such as whether one woman had borne Clinton's child--and whether the child resembled Clinton. In a bout of Clintonesque damage control, a source close to Starr told TIME that the interview notes "contain no reference" to such questions and that the agents "have no recollection" of asking them.

The President was understandably silent about all this, but his surrogates treated the news like a hanging curve ball. "A salacious witch-hunt," cried former White House counsels Abner Mikva and Jack Quinn, demanding that Starr either abandon this avenue of inquiry or resign. Pumped with rage and delight, adviser James Carville recited a litany of Whitewater inquiries: "The RTC report, the FDIC report, the Gonzales hearings, the Leach hearings, the D'Amato hearings, the Fiske special prosecutorship, the Starr special prosecutorship--and you know where we are? Into some troopers trying to talk to some women. [The investigation] is in the ditch because that's where it started."