It took five months and almost 7,000 words, but The New Republic and its editor Franklin Foer have finally retracted the piece “Shock Troops.”

As most of the blog world knows by now, TNR published “Shock Troops” on July 13 under the byline Scott Thomas, which TNR identified as a pseudonym for a soldier then serving in Iraq. He described how war “distorts moral judgments,” in Foer’s words. Scott Thomas mentioned three anecdotes to support his contention: he and his comrades cracking vulgar jokes about a woman with a scarred face while she sat in close proximity; a soldier paraded around with the fragment of an exhumed skull on his head; and a driver of a Bradley Fighting Vehicle who took pride in running over dogs.

Except that Scott Thomas — whose real name is Scott Thomas Beauchamp — turned out to be a fabulist. Here’s the conclusion of the Foer’s piece, “The Fog of War: The Story of Our Baghdad Diarist:”

In retrospect, we never should have put Beauchamp in this situation. He was a young soldier in a war zone, an untried writer without journalistic training. We published his accounts of sensitive events while granting him the shield of anonymity–which, in the wrong hands, can become license to exaggerate, if not fabricate.When I last spoke with Beauchamp in early November, he continued to stand by his stories. Unfortunately, the standards of this magazine require more than that. And, in light of the evidence available to us, after months of intensive re-reporting, we cannot be confident that the events in his pieces occurred in exactly the manner that he described them. Without that essential confidence, we cannot stand by these stories.

What is most striking about TNR’s piece is its Clinton-esque quality: grudging and self-justifying in tone and still eager to lash out at its critics even when the story has been shattered into a thousand pieces. In reading Foer’s piece, you get the sense that he’s seething at The Weekly Standard, the “ideological[ly] motivated” journal which first blew the whistle on the story; at conservative bloggers, who were “fixated” on this story; and at the U.S. Army, whose behavior was “suspicious.”

It turns out, of course, that it was TNR’s critics, and not TNR, who were vindicated, and all honor is due to them.

What The New Republic didn’t understand, and still seems unable to grasp, is that they and others saw this for what it was: an effort to use Beauchamp’s story to paint an ugly portrait of those serving in Iraq. The magazine had turned against the war, and this piece would help turn people against those serving in the war. What has happened instead is that the situation in Iraq is turning around — and the TNR piece has utterly collapsed.

Since mid-July this story was a torpedo aimed directly at the hull of TNR; the torpedo has now hit its mark. The damage is enormous and Franklin Foer’s explanation — which contains no apology to TNR’s readers or, more significantly, to the people in Beauchamp’s unit — will only compound the damage. What Franklin Foer calls a “controversy” is really a scandal. And Scott Beauchamp will now take his place aside Stephen Glass in TNR’s Hall of Shame.