Let's be honest: Investigative journalism can make readers feel like they're trapped in the movie "Groundhog Day." Just as Bill Murray's character was forced to relive the same day, we're offered an indistinguishable stream of exposes of government corruption, corporate malfeasance and school board shenanigans.

Confused minds wonder: Why did Alberto Gonzalez fire Jim Black? Why did Karl Rove try to buy yellow cakes from Valerie Plame -- was it a school fundraiser? And why was Mike Nifong hiding WMDs in his thong? (There were no WMDs? Never mind.)

As scandals have collapsed onto one another since Watergate (when Nixon traded plumbing fixtures for the hostages in Iraq), the very notion of investigative journalism has come into question. Can it be saved?

Perhaps it can, by replacing complicated scenarios with common knowledge. One intrepid reporter is leading the way: Alex Heard of The New Republic. With a bold "I.M." emblazoned across his chest, Investigative Man is exposing the obvious with a vengeance. His first subject is not a powerful purloiner or frisky fifth-grade teacher but humorist and former Raleigh resident David Sedaris. In an expose titled "This American Lie," Heard accuses Sedaris, who has earned wide acclaim for humorous essays drawn from his life, of "flubberizing the truth for comic effect."

But Heard is more like the obsessive Inspector Javert than Woodward and Bernstein, who required at least two confirming sources before publishing charges in The Washington Post.

Consider his investigation of the Sedaris story "Giant Dreams, Midget Abilities." Heard does not dispute that 12-year-old David took guitar lessons from a short musician in Raleigh. Instead, he asserts that the teacher, whom Sedaris calls Mr. Mancini, was not the quirky homophobe the story makes him out to be. His proof: a former student of the same instructor who tells him, "My favorite recollections of the character represented as Mr. Mancini are not the same" as Sedaris'.

Case closed!

Heard also has a problem with the story "Go Carolina," in which Sedaris asserts that his speech therapy class in elementary school had as much to do with identifying nascent homosexuals as correcting lisps. "None of the therapy students were girls," Sedaris writes. "They were all boys like me who kept movie star scrapbooks and made their own curtains."

To debunk this cruel hoax, Heard quotes John Mallette, Sedaris' principal at Brooks Elementary School in Raleigh: "I don't understand why he thinks we would make decisions about a speech class based on such factors. I'm sorry it seemed that way to him."

It is a tribute to our school system that Mallette suggests greater insight into the literary process than Heard when he notes that people can see the same situation differently. All literature -- whether fiction or nonfiction -- assigns meaning to experience. Writers do not simply amass facts; they use their knowledge, experience and belief systems to sift and organize them. That's why, for example, the liberal Nation and conservative National Review can offer very different accounts of the same set of facts.

Bottom line: That's how the class seemed to Sedaris.

Or maybe not. In truth, Heard has more than one source to support his accusations, an unimpeachable witness named David Sedaris.

Heard's article -- which appears in the March 19 issue of The New Republic -- contains many confessional quotes:

"I exaggerate wildly for the sake of the story," Sedaris told The Times-Picayune in New Orleans. "Mostly in dialogue."

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