For the major media, Watergate was the “good war,” in which purely heroic reporters brought down the thoroughly villainous Richard Nixon.

So the belated revelation that W. Mark Felt was Deep Throat is being cheered by the media establishment – even if those cheers sound a bit like last gasps.

Not surprisingly, The Washington Post ran seven self-back-patting articles Wednesday, including two on the front page. But others in the Old Media joined in, too: Felt-is-“Throat” led all three nightly broadcast news shows and filled up countless other news holes.

For the mostly liberal MSM – mainstream media – the Felt story is a chance to walk down happy-memory lane, to the halcyon days of the 1970s, before talk radio, cable news and the blogosphere. Yes, Nixon was president, but liberalism was nevertheless entrenched in the media and in Congress.

So when Watergate erupted in 1973, the media and the Democrats were ready. Their man, Archibald Cox, a top Justice Department official under John F. Kennedy, was brought in from Harvard to do in Nixon. And when Nixon fired Cox, he was forced to name yet another loyal Democrat, Leon Jaworski, to finish the job.

Let’s make one thing perfectly clear: Nixon was a crook. His White House tapes prove that. But what was absent back then was any sense of perspective in which Nixon’s sins were compared to those of other presidents. As an impressionable teen back then, I remember the chairman of the Watergate investigating committee, Sen. Sam Ervin, D-N.C., declaring that the scandal was “the greatest tragedy this country has ever suffered, (worse than) the Civil War.” At the time, I took those words to heart, mostly because there was no voice in the media to simply laugh out loud in derisive response. Watergate was worse than the death of 600,000 people in the War Between the States? Worse than the Depression? Worse than any number of disasters, epidemics, lynchings and assassinations? Please.

A few voices with perspective popped up, but only on the fringes. In 1977, Victor Lasky published “It Didn’t Start With Watergate,” which chronicled Democratic presidential wrongdoing, including Kennedy’s misuse of the IRS and the FBI, as well as Lyndon Johnson’s wiretapping of Barry Goldwater. In today’s more diverse media environment, Lasky’s book would be a huge best seller.

OK, back to the present. Felt is being lionized, but he’s a strange kind of hero. In 1980, he was convicted of ordering FBI agents to burgle the homes of political dissidents. Isn’t that kind of close to what Nixon’s men were guilty of?

And after decades of denial, at 91, now he comes forward – or at least his daughter does, on the stroke-ridden man’s behalf. As she explained to Vanity Fair, “Bob Woodward’s gonna get all the glory for this, but we could make at least enough money to pay some bills.”

Woodward, of course, gets money as well as glory. After decades’ worth of book and movie deals, he and Carl Bernstein sold their papers for $5 million. Some of that wealth comes from the deliberate “embellishment” of the Deep Throat legend, according to Watergate expert Adrian Havill, who demonstrated the physical implausibility of many of the cloak-and-dagger details – the moved flowerpots, the marked newspapers – in his 1993 book, “Deep Truth.”

And Timothy Noah of Slate.com – a Web site owned, interestingly enough, by The Washington Post – took note of other untruths. For example, Woodward always described Deep Throat as a heavy smoker. But, in fact, Felt was not a smoker. While Woodward might call this faux detail a piece of “necessary misdirection,” in order to protect a source, Noah snapped, “I call it conscious fabrication, however trivial.” Watergate was not trivial.

But neither was it an Armageddon-like triumph of good over evil. But for sure, it represented the high-water mark of the MSM, before its tide rolled out, drained away by new technology. We shall not see that sort of unidirectional media-flood again.