DATE: Friday, June 27, 1997                 TAG: 9706270005

SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B10  EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Editorial 

                                            LENGTH:   54 lines

LOW-WATER MARK KENNETH STARR'S GUMSHOES HAVE NO BUSINESS CHASING STORIES OF BILL CLINTON'S INFIDELITIES.

Special Prosecutor Kenneth Starr's amazingly elastic investigation of President and Mrs. Clinton's involvement in the Whitewater land deal is stretched beyond all reason by the revelation this week that his gumshoes are questioning Arkansas state troopers about Mr. Clinton's involvement in the 1980s with women other than his wife.

This is not the first time Starr has leapt far beyond the original bounds of his investigative territory. In trying to find out what, if any, misdeeds the Clintons committed in an Arkansas land-development deal nearly 20 years ago, Starr has offered hair-thin reasoning for looking into commodities sales, campaign financing arrangements, patronage jobs for Clinton friends and a raft of other as-yet-unproved allegations.

The latest is the least defensible. Starr's deputy, through a quantum leap in reasoning, contends that in grilling the troopers about Clinton's skirt-chasing, they are trying to connect with anybody he was so intimate with that he might have whispered to them details of his Whitewater involvement.

Under this shaky pretext, Starr's investigators, according to interviews with troopers published in The Washington Post, felt compelled to ask the officers if they had ever seen Clinton have sex; if one of the dozen or more women on the list they provided had borne a child fathered by Clinton, or a child that ``looked like'' Clinton. Prominent on the list were the names Paula Corbin Jones and Gennifer Flowers.

Ms. Flowers' involvement with Bill Clinton was hashed out in public well before his first election. Ms. Jones' involvement with Clinton will be settled in the proper forum, a court of civil jurisdiction. If Clinton, as governor, used state troopers as scout dogs in his wanderings, that's an issue for the state of Arkansas to address, not the federal government. And that Clinton has been known to cross the boundaries of his marriage vows is hardly a revelation to the American public.

Long before this latest turn, patience with Starr's investigation was well eroded, even among some Republicans. He should order an immediate end to the keyhole-peeping into Clinton's sexual past and redirect his investigators to the task at hand: the ill-doings, if any, connected to the Whitewater land deal and any actions that grew directly from it. Emphasis on directly.

Republicans have complained in the past of special-prosecutor investigations into their alleged misdeeds that devolved into fishing expeditions. They were right. And Clinton supporters are justified at this point in complaining mightily that Starr and his minions are way out of bounds.

After three years, millions of dollars and an abortive attempt to give the whole thing up to run a beachside California college campus, Starr has yet to connect the Clintons, publicly, to a prosecutable offense. It is time that he do so, if he can.

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