Would you expect Bill Clinton to write a book called "The Joys of Marital Fidelity"? Or O.J. to write one about the evils of beating up on your wife?

Not unless you've been smoking some powerful 'shrooms, you wouldn't.

Neither of those tomes is as unlikely as one by former Attorney General John Ashcroft called "How I Stopped the Bush Administration from Using the Constitution as Toilet Paper."

Ashcroft isn't writing such a book, but he could.

I know, I know. Ashcroft may be the unlikeliest last line of defense against an out-of-control presidential administration you could imagine.

A political reactionary best known for losing his Missouri Senate race to a dead man and for covering up the breast of a topless statue in the Department of Justice building, Ashcroft is just about the last man you'd expect to assume the Gary Cooper role of defender of the Constitution at High Noon.

Yet that is precisely the role he seems to have heroically played when high noon struck. That's about the symbolic time it was in 2004 when then-White House Counsel Alberto "Lawless" Gonzales tried to pressure him to approve an extension for a warrantless surveillance program (or an even more secret spying operation).

Gonzales denies applying undue pressure, of course, but he also stated that Ashcroft was lucid when he talked to him. Testimony from a former deputy attorney general and recently released notes from FBI Director Robert Mueller, who met with Ashcroft moments after Gonzales failed to get his blessing, contradict Gonzales' assertion.

Mueller described Ashcroft, hospitalized to undergo gall bladder surgery, as "feeble," "barely articulate" and "clearly stressed" after his meeting with Gonzales.

Not only does it appear that, as Michigan Democrat John Conyers Jr., said, the White House tried to "goad" a sick man into signing the surveillance reauthorization, it refused even to let him know all of the details or consult with staff.

Most of us wouldn't buy a 1976 hoopty from a used car lot without reading the fine print on the contract, yet we're presented with the unsettling image of the White House counsel -- who is now the nation's top cop -- trying to persuade Ashcroft to bestow his blessings on a surveillance program without being privy to all of the details.

File this one under "believe it or not," but regardless of their political bent, all Americans owe a debt of gratitude to Ashcroft for withstanding the pressure from an overzealous White House.

Despite Ashcroft's stance, the Bush administration continues to trample the Constitution and treat it with the scorn usually reserved for a wet food stamp. This is, remember, the same Alberto Gonzales who called the Geneva Convention's rules against torture "quaint" and the same George W. Bush who in effect said -- without bursting into laughter -- that he as president could ignore laws with which he disagreed. Holy mackerel.

If neither of those realities makes you want to weep, you must not be paying attention.

Ashcroft has been the subject of much-deserved scorn and ridicule throughout his public career. There is nothing in his past that indicates he is anything but a true believer in the infallibility of Bush and all things conservative.

That makes his standing up to the lawless element within the administration -- and his subsequent resignation from that administration in 2004 -- even more impressive.

And troubling.