The first few days of the IRS scandal that would consume Washington for weeks went like this: Conservatives were indignant, the media was outraged, the president had to respond, his allies turned on him ... and only then, the Treasury Department's inspector general released the actual report that had sparked the whole controversy -- in that order. It's a fitting microcosm of the entire saga, which has gone from legacy-tarnishing catastrophe to historical footnote in the intervening six weeks, and a textbook example of how the scandal narrative can dominate Washington and cable news even when there is no actual scandal.

While the initial reports about the IRS targeting looked pretty bad, suggesting that agents singled out tax-exempt applications for Tea Party and conservative groups for extra scrutiny, the media badly bungled the controversy when supposedly sober journalists like Bob Woodward and Chuck Todd jumped to conclusions and assumed the worst from day one. Instead of doing more reporting to discover the true nature and context of the IRS targeting, or at least waiting for their colleagues to do some, the supposedly liberal mainstream press let their eagerness to show they could be just as tough on a Democratic White House as a Republican one get ahead of the facts. We expect politicians to stretch reality to fit a narrative, but the press should be better.

And they would have gotten away with it, too, had their narrative had the benefit of being true. But now, almost two months later, we know that in fact the IRS targeted lots of different kinds of groups, not just conservative ones; that the only organizations whose tax-exempt statuses were actually denied were progressive ones; that many of the targeted conservative groups legitimately crossed the line; that the IG's report was limited to only Tea Party groups at congressional Republicans' request; and that the White House was in no way involved in the targeting and didn't even know about it until shortly before the public did.

In short, the entire scandal narrative was a fiction. But it had real consequences, effectively derailing Obama's agenda not long after a resounding reelection, costing several people their careers, and distracting and misinforming the public. It's not that nothing went wrong at the IRS, but that the transgression merited nowhere near the media response it earned. But instead of acknowledging its error or correcting the record, the mainstream political press has simply moved on to the next game. Now that the emperor has been revealed to have no clothes, it's worth looking back at what went wrong.

The pace at which the scandal went from zero to Watergate was breathtaking, with the narrative of a Nixonian plot to sic the feds on political enemies forming in the immediate hours after the IRS' initial apology for the targeting on Friday, May 10. On NBC's "Nightly News" that day, the first words out of White House correspondent Chuck Todd's mouth were: "It harkens back to a Nixonian-type tactic, if you will, a political tactic here in the White House."

Coming at the end of a week of renewed media interest in the Benghazi attack -- another scandal that was at least two-parts hype to one-part reality -- the two scandals reinforced each other and together created a narrative more powerful than either could possibly hope to be on its own. By Sunday morning, the hosts, guests and pundits on the morning political talk shows easily connected the two and soon there was a cloud of scandal hanging over the White House that every serious person on cable news agreed could doom Obama's entire second term. David Gregory invoked the "second term curse," George Will read the portion of Richard Nixon's Articles of Impeachments that focused on the IRS, David Brooks pointed out that "second terms are generally hit with scandal." Heading into that week, the "compromised second term" narrative was already cemented and would prove impervious to contradicting information for weeks.

Brendan Nyhan, a Dartmouth political scientist who studies the media's role in creating scandals, wasn't particularly surprised. "In other circumstances, the first reports might not have immediately turned into a media firestorm, but the context was very favorable for a scandal to develop and so the media largely embraced the targeting story before all the facts were known," he told Salon.

What's often important in scandals is not that someone violated ethical norms, but that "a public figure or institution are successfully construed as violating ethical norms," he wrote in a recent research paper. Scandals are social constructions and how big one gets often has little to do with the actual severity of the ethical transgression in question, and a lot to do with the political and media context. "In some cases, it will only take a spark from a relatively flimsy allegation to set off a significant controversy, while other environments will be much less prone to scandalous conflagrations."

In other words, it takes two to scandal -- the opposition party needs the media (Fast and Furious didn't work because the press mostly ignored it) and the press needs the opposition party's