About the only good news for the White House these days is how the bad stories keep stepping on each other. The news media, the Democrats and even the most discerning voters simply cannot focus at once on everything that threatens to sideline President Bush’s administration.

Even the daily carnage in Iraq fades from view in the wake of unsettling news, ranging from the Iranian saber-rattling and an international oil crisis to another round of revelations about the mishandling of Hurricane Katrina’s aftermath. And to cap off this wave of negativity, diverting attention from just about everything else, the vice president manages to accidentally shoot someone.

Indeed, Dick Cheney’s Texas birdshot blunder was a prime example of how this bad news rut sometimes benefits the White House — because it overshadowed an unfolding story that could ultimately land the vice president in much more trouble. Just days earlier, we learned that the federal probe of the White House for leaking classified intelligence is more focused on Cheney’s role than once thought. Lawyers for his former chief of staff, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby — who is charged with lying to a grand jury about leaks that revealed the identity of a covert CIA agent — are broadly hinting at their plans to argue that he was acting all along on Cheney’s authority.

The day before Cheney’s shotgun incident overtook the news, details emerged about Libby testifying under oath that he was authorized by “superiors” in 2003 to disclose highly sensitive prewar information to reporters. This raised many questions — most particularly, whether Libby was referring to Cheney himself. The White House was braced for dealing with the fallout from this story. It must have been a relief to instead deal with a hunting accident.

Even when Cheney tacitly acknowledged a role in the leaking of classified information — in the same Feb. 15 television interview during which he first publicly discussed the shooting — the revelation took a back seat to his explanation of how he shot his hunting companion. While taking care to avoid commenting on the specifics of Libby’s case, Cheney asserted that he has the power to remove “top secret” stamps. When Fox News’ Brit Hume asked whether “a vice president has the authority to declassify information,” Cheney replied that he was acting under an “executive order,” adding that “I’ve certainly advocated declassification and participated in declassification decisions.”

That response almost certainly will earn Cheney a summons to testify at Libby’s trial, scheduled for early next year, if that wasn’t already guaranteed. The big question will focus on what Libby’s lawyers will probably claim: that Cheney personally authorized, and maybe even directed, Libby to leak secret information to discredit an administration critic, Joseph C. Wilson IV — whose wife, Valerie Plame, was the CIA agent uncovered by the leaks. The aim of the leaks was to imply that Plame was behind the CIA’s hiring of her husband to investigate whether Iraq had purchased nuclear materials in Africa, in hopes of undermining his eventual conclusions that there was no such evidence.

How interesting that when this administration wanted to spread bad news about a critic they had no qualms about talking to the Washington news media. The Wilson slam made its way to Time, NBC and The New York Times, as well as to columnist Robert Novak, who first reported Valerie Plame’s identity.

But when there is news about the vice president accidentally injuring his South Texas hunting partner Harry Whittington, the White House press corps is kept in the dark, and the next day Cheney has another person in the hunting party call the local Texas newspaper because, as Cheney put it to Hume, “I thought that made good sense because you can get as accurate a story as possible from somebody who knew and understood hunting.”

But the travesty of the hunting caper is not so much about which news outlet first got the story as it is about how long it took. Waiting overnight to call anyone meant that this incident was not publicly disclosed until the newspaper’s Web site published it Feb. 12, nearly a full day after the shooting occurred.

And yet, Libby and others at the White House wasted no time leaking their hit job on Wilson and Plame to the Washington press corps. The timelines in Libby’s federal indictment and other court documents based on the grand jury investigation show the Bush team in rapid deployment July 6, 2003, when Wilson went public, writing in The New York Times that intelligence was “twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat.”

Cheney’s sporting fiasco certainly stepped on what would have been another public airing of the CIA leak case, but the prosecution of his former top aide is a story with legs. Once this trial starts, Cheney might be well advised to go on another hunting trip.

Contributing Editor Craig Crawford is a news analyst for MSNBC, CNBC and “The Early Show” on CBS. He can be reached at ccrawford@cq.com.