AUSTIN, Texas — How silly can this get? Republicans are now threatening to impeach Attorney General Janet Reno because she has so far not named a special prosecutor to look into whether President Clinton broke a law written in 1883 — which was intended to prevent another problem entirely — by making fund-raising phone calls from one room in the White House instead of another that might be legal if the calls raised soft money but not hard money. Is all that perfectly clear?

House Speaker Newt Gingrich made the astonishing suggestion that Reno resign because "she looks like a fool." If everyone in Washington had to resign when he or she looked like a fool, the vacancy rate would be astronomical and Gingrich would be long gone. The only people who looked like fools last week were the Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee trying to bully and stampede Reno. What a hopeless endeavor that was.

Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott sneeringly referred to her as "Gen. Stonewall Reno," and she did indeed stand like a stone wall. However you define "judicial temperament," Reno has it, not to mention integrity out the wazoo. She was both cool and implacable through hours of verbal bullying by Republicans, who apparently still believe that if you are mean to girls, they will break down and cry.

I have considerably more faith in Reno's integrity than in that of the Republicans who were trying to reincarnate Sen. Joseph McCarthy last week. (And more faith in her integrity than in President Clinton's, I might add. And will.) Let me suggest why Reno might be reluctant to appoint a special prosecutor in this case, quite aside from the nit-picking interpretation of an antiquated law.

Reno has already appointed four special prosecutors who have spent close to $40 million, and the grand sum total of their efforts thus far is to accuse former Agriculture Secretary Mike Espy of having accepted $20,000 worth of gifts, most notably tickets to a Super Bowl game. That was very wrong of him, and if he is found guilty, he will doubtless have to pay a fine. Also still under investigation are the love life of former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Henry Cisneros (no public money involved) and the business dealings of former Commerce Secretary Ron Brown, who has been seriously dead for quite some time.

But the real prize in the bunch is the Whitewater investigation, now in its fourth year and over $30 million. This investigation of a 1978 land deal in Arkansas is edging up on the records set by the Iran-Contra investigation for both length and expense.

Iran-Contra, you will recall, was about our government's having illegally sold arms to an enemy in order to use the profits to support one side of a civil war in Central America, which our government lied about being involved in. Constitutional violations were the issue.

Reno originally appointed Robert Fiske, a Republican with 24-carat credentials, to investigate Whitewater. But Fiske offended the Republican red-hots by finding that poor Vince Foster had indeed offed himself. So the red-hots put pressure on Judge David Sentelle, head of a three-judge panel that then dismissed Fiske and appointed Kenneth Starr on the grounds that Reno's appointment of Fiske created "the appearance of a conflict of interest." Sentelle himself is so careless about "the appearance of a conflict of interest" that he saw nothing wrong in lunching with Sens. Jesse Helms and Lauch Faircloth of North Carolina just before appointing the rankly partisan Starr.

Starr, a right-wing Republican activist who volunteered to help Paula Jones gratis in her lawsuit against Clinton, has since demonstrated his regard for the appearance of a conflict of interest by contributing to Republican candidates, continuing to represent tobacco companies and defense contractors, and preparing to decamp entirely to the deanship of a law school. And then there's his conduct of the investigation itself, which has become an anti-Clinton rumor factory.

If Starr is interested in becoming a good prosecutor, he should study Reno's consistent refusal to discuss the details of an ongoing investigation. Starr's most notable contribution to jurisprudence so far has been the imprisonment of Susan McDougal for more than a year now for refusing to talk to him.

In sum, what we have here is the politicization of the special-prosecutor process, which was itself introduced to de-politicize the investigatory process. No wonder Reno is wary. I realize that Republicans, at least some of whom suffer from a fixation about payback and tit-for-tat, believe the Iran-Contra investigation was political in nature, but at least it was about something more serious than which room the phone calls were made from.

Now, is there a big, fat, stinking mess of corruption in Washington? Yes, there is; it is the form of legalized bribery by which our politicians finance their campaigns. But the stench from that cesspool is in danger of being outstunk by Republican hypocrisy.

Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, leader of the anti-reform faction on campaign finance, now threatens to impeach Reno for not acting on Clinton's phone calls. And this is the same McConnell who, according to some media reports, urged the Senate Ethics Committee not to pursue Sen. Phil Gramm for having made fund-raising calls from his office on the grounds that so many other senators were probably guilty of the same thing.

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Molly Ivins is a columnist for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.

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