It’s often the bit players who do you in, not the main actors who get all the limelight.

Back in 1973, a Deputy Assistant to the President named Alexander P. Butterfield disclosed, in a closed congressional committee hearing, that both the Oval Office and the president’s office in the Executive Office Building were wired for sound, and had been since 1970.

“Deputy Assistant to the President,” impressive as it sounds, is not too far up the White House chain of command. But Mr. Butterfield’s little footnote in history provided the critical bit of evidence that eventually answered the questions that lay at the heart of the Watergate Hearings: “What did the president know, and when did he know it?”

The existence of the audiotapes, and the content therein, led directly to the resignation of the 37^th President of these United States, Richard Milhous Nixon, the following year.

That resignation ended one of the gravest constitutional crises in the history of the republic. The institutions built into our system of government by the founders to protect the integrity of the republic held, and the nation, despite major divisions, survived.

Recently, the first two criminal indictments were handed down in our current constitutional crisis – whether a foreign government attempted, or perhaps succeeded in, affecting the course of the 2016 presidential election.

A couple of things off the bat. An indictment is not a finding of guilt. Even if guilt is ultimately found to exist, the current charges revolve around old-fashioned greed, money laundering, false statements, and financial chicanery. As the current administration is quick to point out, the potential criminal conduct does not involve the president, his campaign, or his tenure as president.

Under the law, there is a presumption of innocence, and the main actors, Paul Manafort, former chairman of the Trump campaign, and Rick Gates, Manafort’s right-hand man, are entitled to that presumption until guilt is established beyond a reasonable doubt.

However, there is a latter-day Alexander Butterfield. His name is George Papadopoulos, He is described as having been a “volunteer” working on the Trump campaign. Not unlike Butterfield, he appears to be a bit player, but for two salient points: He has already pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI … and he is now a cooperating witness through that plea agreement with the Feds.

From his guilty plea, it appears Papadopoulos actively sought to contact Russian interests, communicated that fact to Trump campaign officials not yet officially identified, and was encouraged by campaign officials to continue his efforts to find “dirt” on Hillary Clinton from Russian sources who claimed to be in possession of information previously hacked from Clinton’s emails, and those of the Democrat National Committee.

On the surface, this would be nothing more than a case of “opposition research,” a common practice in all campaigns, except for one thing – to pursue and accept such information from a foreign government, or that government’s operatives, is illegal.

If true, Mr. Papadopoulos’ contribution to history is to provide the first provable connection between the Trump campaign and a foreign power.

It moves alleged illegal conduct from the realm of conjecture into questions of fact, and moves the whole sorry mess closer to1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Let’s stop right there. The point is not to prejudge the outcome; the point is to allow our democratic institutions to come to an outcome one way or the other.

This will not be as simple as it sounds. Things are going to get rough. Partisans on both sides will be whipped into a fever pitch by their respective talking heads and loyalists.

There is little an ordinary citizen can do to affect the eventual outcome. However, how we treat each other during this time of national angst is within our control. We can disagree without being disagreeable. We can respect competing views if they are grounded in fact and not in some alternate reality.

We can allow our institutions to work.

The country survived Watergate. The country can survive this current test as well – if we can agree to do that.