In the October 7, 1996, issue of The New Yorker, in a piece that could have run under the magazine's "Department of Further Amplification" heading, Mark Singer, a staff writer since 1974, confessed that he had allowed himself to be conned.

Specifically, he acknowledged that a 22,000-word story that he had written shortly before the 1992 presidential election was based in large part on what he now considers a lie.

The essence of that 1992 piece was that a drug dealer named Brett Kimberlin had been deprived of his constitutional rights by federal prison officials. They had prevented him from holding a press conference on the eve of the 1988 presidential election to discuss his claims that, for a period of time in the '70s, he had sold small amounts of marijuana to an Indiana University law student, Dan Quayle.

True, Kimberlin was silenced by prison officials. But Singer no longer believes that he ever sold any drugs to Quayle. "I spent four years asking questions about Kimberlin," Singer says, "and along the way I never met a soul who could offer genuine corroboration of the fable that brought him to my attention in the first place."

By itself, the New Yorker piece was both important and necessary. The book-length version is another matter. Citizen K -- The Deeply Weird American Journey of Brett Kimberlin adds little to the New Yorker piece, and has the unhappy smell of something that was completed mainly because the advance money already had been spent.

Spent not only by Singer but also by Kimberlin, since Singer followed up on his original article by entering into a partnership with Kimberlin in which the convict would cooperate in the writing of the book and would be given a chunk of the royalties for his efforts. Singer now says in looking back that "I think we both assumed we had the same story in mind -- an assumption that now strikes me as both conspiratorial and naive." The partnership also will likely strike many as ethically questionable and not very smart.

It's hard to sympathize much with Singer in any of this, both because his original piece can now be seen as politically motivated as well as badly done (at one point he even fantasized about being invited to the Clinton inaugural for helping torpedo Quayle), and because his book, at bottom, is also a bit of a con. One has to slog through 320 of its 381 pages before discovering that Singer now considers Kimberlin's claims of persecution to be largely a fraud, and some readers are likely to consider this a waste of their time.

What Singer calls the "deeply weird American journey" is merely the story of a minor criminal, convicted of drug dealing and a series of bombings, who claimed that because he had sold pot to Dan Quayle and was willing to talk about it he had been tossed into semi-solitary confinement and then denied a parole, thus becoming -- a term used by others but embraced by Singer in his 1992 article -- a "political prisoner."

(The eight bombings in question took place in an Indianapolis suburb within a period of six days. It's still not clear what the bombings were intended to accomplish. One theory held that they were intended to divert the attention of the tiny local police force from its investigation of a murder in which Kimberlin was thought by some to be involved, though he was never charged.)

Whether Kimberlin did what he said he did (sold pot to Dan Quayle) and didn't do what he insisted he didn't do (planted bombs) was of course central to the notion that he was a political prisoner, and Singer's 1992 piece was crafted to suggest strongly that Kimberlin was being honest about both.

Now, four years later, Singer has a different view. The pot-selling to Quayle, he now sees as a "fable," and Kimberlin's denial of any involvement in the bombings no longer rings true. Singer writes, "I spent months wandering through his disclaimers and prevarications before deciding, finally, that this was a case of homework, along with truth, being eaten by the dog, pissed on by the cat, and buried in the backyard."

 It's tempting to say that the real value of the book is not in the story of Kimberlin, who now is free and was last seen brokering business deals in the Ukraine, but in the lessons that are here for other reporters and editors. But those lessons are pretty basic and obvious:

¥ Political bias is poison to journalism.

¥ Economic partnerships with sources can be both dangerous and corrupting, and are likely to end up as painful as any other bad marriage.

¥ The fact that the government treats someone badly doesn't mean that the person was a true innocent to begin with; Murray Kempton has noted often that in the case of one prominent New York heroin dealer, the government "framed him for something that he did."

¥ Information that can't be verified shouldn't be used.

Singer says that he had set out in 1992 to figure out and convey to readers just how it was that the fact that Kimberlin was a convict made him "not credible" to certain members of the press, while the simple fact that Quayle was who he was made him credible. But even if a person seems credible, most journalists have problems with information that's not verifiable. And early on it became clear that Kimberlin's wasn't. The person who supposedly introduced him to Quayle was conveniently dead, and Kimberlin could produce no one else who had ever been witness to a purchase or use of marijuana by Quayle.

And when Singer finally got around to doing the sort of reporting he should have done at the start, he found one Kimberlin story after another to have been exaggerated or twisted or made up completely. He also tracked down the polygraph expert who had been hired by Kimberlin's lawyer at his trial, and was told that -- despite Kimberlin's contention that he had passed with flying colors -- Kimberlin had "flunked the test every way in the world" on the things that most mattered.

Much of this could have been learned back in 1992 had Singer and his editors not been so anxious to get the story into print before the election -- and into what, not coincidentally, was Tina Brown's first issue, which Singer notes was "launched with unbridled hoopla." And if they had taken the time to back up and think calmly it might have occurred to them then -- as Singer now concedes -- that it simply wasn't very likely that someone who claimed to have been importing marijuana by the ton would have taken time out every few weeks to head off to a Burger Chef in Indianapolis to sell one-ounce bags of pot to a law student.

Singer got around all his lack of corroboration by focusing the 1992 piece on the gagging of Kimberlin by prison officials, and then citing the supposed drug sales to Quayle as the information they desperately wanted to gag. He insists to this day that this was the real and legitimate point of his story, but this seems disingenuous at best. Absent the Quayle angle, it's not likely that he would have spent several months of his time, a thick slab of Tina Brown's money, and 22,000 words worth of New Yorker paperstock to write about a short-term silencing of a quick-witted convict. Indeed, he now admits that he "ardently, inordinately" wanted the Democrats to win the election, and hoped his reporting would help defeat Quayle and George Bush.

He also had others holding his coat and prodding him along, including Garry Trudeau, a friend and classmate at Yale, who earlier had devoted three weeks' worth of Doonesbury strips to Kimberlin and his allegations about Quayle.

What the coat-holders and editors, and for that matter Kimberlin, now think of all this is not known. Singer's own "mea culpa" in the October 7 New Yorker may have set a record for both candor and length. It might have been wiser to have left it at that. Absent proof that he was turned into a political prisoner by his government, the story of Kimberlin is neither important nor even very interesting. The book itself provides little in the way of new and useful insights into the drug culture, the courts, or the penal system. The journalism issues -- the failures and pressures that caused one of the most prestigious magazines in America to buy Kimberlin's bridge -- are acknowledged but neither carefully nor fully explored. This is not likely to become a major motion picture. Yet the Knopf company ordered up a first printing of 50,000 copies, many of which seem certain to show up remaindered at a bookstore near you. Which is just one more thing about this whole matter that some will find deeply weird.

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