JAMES TARANTO: Meet William Wilkins. Will the IRS scandal implicate the White House? Let’s hope so.

Have you noticed that the Internal Revenue Service scandal seems to be getting ever closer to the White House? The IRS originally tried to set up “rogue employees in Cincinnati” as fall guys. But in congressional testimony, they revealed that the targeting of dissenting groups was directed from Washington.

As Peggy Noonan noted, the Washington supervisor, Carter Hull, last week implicated the IRS’s office of chief counsel: “The IRS chief counsel is named William Wilkins. And . . . he is one of only two Obama political appointees in the IRS.”

Congressional investigators appear to be conducting a very methodical inquiry, working their way up through the IRS hierarchy and not getting out ahead of themselves by making claims not supported by the available evidence. Note, for example, that they have not (yet) claimed Wilkins himself directed the abusive behavior, only his “office.” Democrats and their media allies, perhaps deceptively, interpret the investigation’s slow progress as a sign that there’s nothing to the scandal. But if that’s the case, they should be all for a thorough investigation.

Indeed.