President Bush must determine quickly how a false statement was included in a speech.

Critics of President Bush are having a field day going after him for his statement in the State of the Union address claiming Iraqi officials had tried to buy uranium from African nations for nuclear weapons.

Since the Jan. 28, pre-Iraqi war Bush address to the nation, various Washington officials have acknowledged the statement was incorrect.

Now the task is to find out how the statement got into this important speech. Hopefully Bush will make it clear, and the sooner the better, that he intends to get to the bottom of this mess and disclose such findings to the public. Someone is responsible. The speech was written and rewritten many, many times and cleared and edited by many, many others.

If Watergate taught any politician anything, it is the importance of telling the truth, no matter how embarrassing or harmful it might be. This should be remembered when trying to find out how a false statement got into a president’s address.

That aside, it is interesting to watch Bush critics fall all over themselves trying to make political hay out of the false statement. In addition to Democrat political hopefuls and the usual Bush critics, liberal news people are showing their colors in how they can’t let the matter alone and are visibly delighted to keep probing the story.

As both Democrat and Republican lawmakers try to remind readers and TV viewers, Saddam Hussein did indeed have weapons of mass destruction and used such weapons. They pull no punches in saying he should have been taken out of office by one means or another. There was nothing good that could be said about the vicious leader.

Bush’s statement, in itself, about Iraq trying to obtain uranium to build nuclear weapons was not the single, critical issue to sell the point that Hussein needed to be expelled, dead or alive. However, by making such a statement, subsequently proved to be false, every effort must be made to find out how it happened and take appropriate action.