WASHINGTON — With all that’s going on in the world — appalling new photos from Abu Ghraib, a looming nuclear showdown with Iran, Hurricane Katrina victims being evicted from New Orleans hotels while 11,000 mobile homes sit unused in Arkansas — isn’t it time to move on from the tragicomic Cheney Shooting Incident?Not just yet.

Not until we deconstruct his strange interview with Brit Hume on Fox News the other night. Fox, by the way, did as much as any media outlet to keep the Cheney story alive, first by running story after story accusing other media of keeping the story alive and then by filling a whole news cycle with snippets from Hume’s exclusive interview. But when Fox finally showed the whole encounter, it was compelling television.

What did we learn from the vice president’s version of the shooting? Plenty.

We learned, as Cheney acknowledged, that it wasn’t 78-year-old attorney Harry Whittington’s fault that Cheney blasted him in the face, neck and chest with a 28-gauge shotgun. “You can’t blame anybody else,” the vice president said. “I’m the guy who pulled the trigger and shot my friend. And I say that is something I’ll never forget.”

That was the substance of the interview — Cheney confirmed something we already knew. It was the atmospherics that proved revelatory and disturbing.

Cheney is often described as the most powerful vice president in the nation’s history — he mentioned to Hume that he has the personal authority to declassify secret information, for example — and it seems clear from his recounting of the shooting’s aftermath that his authority extends far beyond White House control. He shot Whittington last Saturday afternoon and didn’t bother to speak to a soul in the White House until Sunday morning. Even Karl Rove, the president’s political wizard, had to get his information elsewhere — from Katharine Armstrong, the doyenne of the 50,000-acre ranch where Cheney was spending the weekend.

Cheney revealed that he didn’t talk to President Bush about the shooting until Monday. Is it just me, or is that weird?

After the shooting, Cheney understandably focused first on Whittington’s well-being. But after Whittington was off to the hospital, Cheney and the rest of the shooting party went back to the ranch house and had dinner. The vice president left it to others to make the necessary phone calls to Whittington’s children. He went to bed without having told the public anything.

Cheney knew that the White House communications people “urged us to get the story out,” he said. But it was “my call,” he told Hume, that civilian Armstrong would be the one to make the first public statement, and that she would make it by calling a reporter she knew at the Corpus Christi Caller-Times, not the White House press pool.

Everyone else in the administration seems to believe that was a terrible decision, but Cheney defended it to Hume in a way that seemed, frankly, oblivious.

For a man defined by his reputation for cool competence in times of crisis, Cheney was remarkably clueless without his handlers. “I had no press person with me, I didn’t have any press people with me,” he told Hume.

Cheney also appeared deeply shaken. It was stunning to hear the least touchy-feely public figure in Washington go all open-book and confessional: “The image of him falling is something I’ll never be able to get out of my mind. I fired, and there’s Harry falling. And it was, I’d have to say, one of the worst days of my life, at that moment.”

So here we have a vice president with vast, autonomous power who makes a serious mistake — and yes, we all make mistakes, sometimes bad ones — but then doesn’t tell anybody until he’s had dinner and a night’s sleep. He feels naked because he’s not surrounded by a covey of spokespeople. He’s either emotionally devastated by what he’s done or so arrogant that he believes he doesn’t have to face the public. Or both.

Four days after the incident, prodded by Rove and others, he finally speaks. We see the icy, confident, I-know-I’m-right Dick Cheney only when he’s defending his obviously ill-advised “call” about how to disclose the incident. Otherwise he seems remorseful and distracted, as if a part of him will always be in that clearing on the Armstrong ranch, firing his shotgun and seeing Harry Whittington go down.

“The president’s satisfied with what the vice president said yesterday,” Scott McClellan, the White House spokesman, told reporters. But if I were George W. Bush, I wouldn’t be satisfied at all. I’d be worried about what Cheney might say or do next.

Eugene Robinson’s e-mail address is eugenerobinson[AT]washpost.com.