I’ve never had a case of the Mondays quite like today. I can’t imagine I’m alone.

Another week like last and I’m not sure we make it to Election Day with any sense of perspective . . . or sanity.

On the bailout/rescue/investment/Marxist dream plan, we saw conservative vs. conservative, with the only certainty in the room being uncertainty. On Sarah Palin, we saw MSNBC in heat at the prospect of conservatives turning on the woman to John McCain’s right. During the same week, I read from folks on the Right that I’m jealous of the attention Palin’s getting because I made the slightest legitimate criticism as I urged the McCain campaign to use their veep nominee well. When I gave her post-debate high marks (thanks for freeing the Gov, guys), folks on the Left dismissed my review as lesbian fantasies (ah, the Internet!). Long after Sean Hannity was talking about terrorist Bill Ayers, the New York Times on Saturday tried to help downplay his relationship with Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama. And by Saturday evening, cnn.com was reporting that National Review had aided the Obama campaign by trying to rewrite Obama’s biography. (The truth is something very different. Just Google Stanley Kurtz.)

This is insanity. Another week like this and we’re all going to be so angry and jittery we’re liable to become a nation of Keith Olbermanns.

Peggy Noonan has a new book out. It’s called Patriotic Grace. It couldn’t have come out at a more perfect time.

We’re a month out from a presidential election. We’re excited to see that, yes, anyone can run for the White House and make the finals. The black son of a single mother and a father from Kenya. A gal who hunts moose — and corrupt pols — from the remotest state of the union. An American hero. A career politician.

But we should be careful not to get caught up in the hyper-partisanship that can ensue, nor in the romance of milestones. There are issues and existential threats.

Noonan is worried about the latter in a big way. It partially comes from living in New York. It’s hard to forget when you live in New York and you see so many targets, and the gap in the sky. But “It’s odd. Stunning, actually.” she writes, that we can not only go through our daily lives but now a presidential election glossing over some of the most critical challenges facing us. Honestly, even John McCain and Sarah Palin, who I think are the grown-ups in the room, winks and all, make light of questions about Pakistan, dismissing Katie Couric’s legitimate pressing as part of a Gotcha! campaign.

Considering that I have no idea what to do with Pakistan, I’d like to know it’s near the top of the minds of the presidential candidates’ and their teams’ minds.

“Man has never developed a weapon he didn’t ultimately use,” Ronald Reagan once warned, and Noonan reminds us.

She writes: “I believe we have to assume that something bad is going to happen, someday, to us. Maybe it will be ten years from now, but maybe not, maybe sooner, much sooner. We have to assume, I think, that it will be a 9/11 times ten, or a hundred, or more, and that it will have a deeply destabilizing effect on our country; that it will test our unity and our endurance, our resourcefulness and faith.”

We can’t afford to wait for the shoe to drop. We ought to be approaching these next few weeks and Election Day with these things in mind. Peggy’s book thinks more long-term than I am thinking today: She wants us to get behind the next president. I’m not there yet; I want us to get over last week — when there was chaos, emotion, lies. We’ve moved to embrace a Leviathan of a plan to save the mortgage industry and maybe the economy. Maybe. How did we get here? The exercise is not to be avoided because it will inevitably lead to that dreaded P-word, partisanship. It has to happen because what’s happened is unacceptable. There was dereliction of duty–we even have it on video — and there must be recriminations. This cannot be allowed to happen again. And the taxpayers are owed an explanation as they worry about the possibility that their bank will go out of business — if it hasn’t already. And they’re also owed an opportunity to weigh whose philosophy makes more sense to avoid this ever happening again.

Adult brownie points to the first who asks, “Why exactly were Fannie and Freddie quasi-government agencies in the first place?”

Our jitters, though, go way beyond the economy.

A friend of mine lost her brother two weeks ago in Afghanistan. On the Oregonian’s website, an attendee at the funeral this weekend for Bruno di Solenni wrote:

Bruno was a lucky man. He was greatly loved by the men he served with, by the people he worked with, by the people he touched in his daily life, in Afghanistan and the United States, and of course, by a close-knit family. He adored his sister, brothers and parents and he seemed to be a man who had no enemies, except the people he never met who set a bomb in the road in a godforsaken stretch of Afghanistan. And if they had known him, perhaps they wouldn’t have been his enemies either.

When we watch candidates these next few weeks, if we don’t have a spouse, child, sibling, or friend over in Iraq or Afghanistan, we should think of families like the di Solennis. The families who don’t have the luxury of putting the enemy out of their mind for one single day. The families who will have empty chairs this Thanksgiving, and perhaps every Thanksgiving, because of that enemy. The families whose patriotic grace, informed and made possible by divine grace, is the reason they sacrifice, raise one who made the choice to serve his nation, and can go on waving the red, white, and blue, of the country they love. We owe each member of those families informed, adult decisions in the voting booth. We owe them a rising above campaign foolishness.

We’ve got to refuse to accept lies and games. Barack Obama can’t defend his relationship with the unrepentant terrorist Bill Ayers. So the New York Times, caught up in the romance of the historic moment that is Obama, joins the campaign in glossing over it. Barack Obama can’t defend his record on human life — he couldn’t stand athwart infanticide in Illinois yelling, Stop. He did just the opposite. And so pro-life Catholics, caught up in the romance, bitter about one issue or another that really ought to take a distant second place behind defending the most innocent human life, help him lie.

If we love our country, we deserve better. We must insist on better. We must ask questions — yes, of both tickets. And just attacking the media doesn’t work as a month-long answer. But we also must insist the media be called out as they campaign for their candidate.

Peggy Noonan’s patriotic grace requires us to approach this election with the seriousness this exceptional country deserves. It will get us through whatever comes of Election Day, too. But it’s going to be a much harder road, if Election Day was lost on the voters.

– Kathryn Jean Lopez is the editor of National Review Online.