Anything's fair in love and war, goes the adage. But when the on-line magazine Salon decided to match "ugly times" with "ugly tactics" by printing a report about Congressman. Henry Hyde's inappropriate love affair 30 years ago, one staffer objected -- publicly -- that it was crossing a journalistic threshold he didn't want to cross. PNS commentator Jonathan Broder recently resigned from Salon. A former foreign correspondent, Broder is filling in as an editor on the foreign desk at National Public Radio.

WASHINGTON -- Recently, I became the first reporter to lose his job in the Lewinsky war -- not for any journalistic excess but for my futile attempt to prevent the publication I worked for from plunging deeper into the muck of sexual disclosure and partisan posturing.

Upon reflection, I see the story of my ouster as a lesson of what happens when one tries to apply old-fashioned journalistic brakes to the new world of Web reporting.

Early this summer, a man approached me with a story of an affair 30 years ago involving Henry Hyde, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, and a married woman. He described himself as a friend of the woman's ex-husband.

Like many other reporters he contacted, I decided to pass. In such situations, responsible journalists are obligated to consider several questions.

Is there a public issue involved?

Answer: No. Hyde's lover was not on the public payroll, was not a foreign agent, did not go public with the affair, had not slapped Hyde with any kind of lawsuit.

Was there hypocrisy on Hyde's part?

Again, the answer is no. Unlike Rep. Helen Chenoweth, the Idaho Republican whose sexual exploits, dug up by reporters, made a mockery of her public moralizing about Clinton's behavior, Hyde had maintained a gentlemanly silence about Clinton's private life. To be sure, Hyde has moralized about family values, but always in the context of his strong stand against abortion. On the issue of Clinton's sexual behavior -- the issue at hand -- there was no sanctimony on Hyde's part.

Was the Hyde story relevant?

Hyde's affair occurred more than 30 years ago. Once again, the answer was no.

In short, the Hyde story simply did not cross the journalistic threshold, and I forgot about it.

At the beginning of September, I learned that the source of the story had called Salon's Editor-in-chief David Talbot and that Talbot was aggressively pursuing the matter. In conversations with the managing editor, David Weir, and with Talbot himself, I strongly advised them to leave the story alone.

The Hyde story was posted on Salon's web site on Sept. 16 with an "editor's statement" explaining why it was appropriate to publish it. The statement, quoting Hyde's abortion-related remarks about family out of context, painted him as a sanctimonious hypocrite.

Then came the real corker. "Aren't we fighting fire with fire, descending to the gutter tactics of those we deplore?" the statement asked. "Frankly, yes. But ugly times call for ugly tactics. When a pack of sanctimonious thugs beats you and your country upside the head with a tire-iron, you can withdraw to the sideline and meditate, or can grab it out of their hands and fight back."

The editor's remarks were not the measured thoughts of a journalist. They were a populist rant, and Salon had clearly and defiantly crossed the line into new, journalistically forbidden territory.

Though some disagree with my opposition to the publication of the Hyde piece, there seems to be general agreement that my editor at Salon overreacted by demanding (or as he claims "accepting") my resignation for going public with it. "After all, this is journalism," CNN's Candy Crowly told her network's media show, "Reliable Sources" last weekend. "We're supposed to be able to speak up when we disagree and not have to worry about losing our jobs."

Perhaps the biggest surprise, however, is that few have seen fit to address publicly the fairness of the Hyde story. At first, many journalists tried to prove that the White House was behind the story, but when that failed, they quickly lost interest. Meanwhile, liberal columnists like Anthony Lewis, Frank Rich, Molly Ivens, Jack Newfield and E.J. Dionne -- the kind of writers one would hope to hear when low blows are landed and when a fellow scribe gets axed for saying so -- have been oddly silent.

But on second thought, it's not all that odd. I now understand that my fatal error was to view Hyde as an individual, entitled to the same journalistic considerations that are applied when editors weigh stories about the private lives of other individuals. I did not understand that in the deeply polarized and politically supercharged atmosphere now surrounding the impeachment debate, those considerations would be no match for the need to portray Hyde as the gander to Clinton's goose.