This editorial was rewritten to reflect breaking news.

In his most recent column, conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer described his own coping mechanism for dealing with “the insanity, incoherence and sheer weirdness emanating daily from the White House.”

“I simply view President Trump as the Wizard of Oz,” wrote Krauthammer. “Loud and bombastic. A charlatan. Nothing behind the screen − other than the institutional chaos that defines his White House and the psychic chaos that governs his ever-changing mind.”

The wizard was on full display the last couple of days.

On Tuesday came the president's shocking decision to fire FBI Director James Comey. Comey was directing the investigation into possible criminal connections between Trump campaign officials and Russian operatives who sought to manipulate the 2016 presidential election to bolster Trump's chances.

And there was Trump's reaction to the testimony of former acting Attorney General Sally Yates, who spoke Monday to a Senate subcommittee investigating the Russian matter.

Remember the climactic scene in the classic movie “The Wizard of Oz”? Toto pulls aside the curtain to reveal the “all-powerful” wizard is a fraud, the product of special effects-enhanced bluster.

“Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain,” the unimpressively human wizard tells Dorothy, the Lion, Tin Man and Scarecrow.

President Trump took to Twitter, the modern-day version the wizard’s amplified bluster machine, to attack Yates.

“Sally Yates made the fake media extremely unhappy today − she said nothing but old news!” tweeted the president.

“The Russia-Trump collusion story is a total hoax, when will this taxpayer funded charade end?” he continued.

The firing of Comey and the effort to dismiss Yates' testimony deliver the same plea: "Don’t look behind the curtain."

Unfortunately for the wizard in the White House, the citizenry is looking and paying more attention by the day. The public should demand the appointment of a special prosecutor and that Congress do its job, set politics aside, and determine what is going on here.

The public's demand for accountability will have to be loud because the appointment of a special prosecutor would have to come from Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein, only recently appointed by Trump and the man who provided the president justification for the Comey firing.

Yates testified that she warned the White House that National Security Adviser Michael Flynn had lied to Vice President Mike Pence about the nature of his discussions with Moscow’s ambassador in Washington in the time before President-elect Trump had taken office. Flynn had said the discussions did not include U.S. sanctions on Russia imposed during the Obama presidency. Pence reassured the public that the Trump administration was not meddling in the sanctions before it took office. U.S. intelligence officials knew that to be untrue. Sanctions were discussed.

The acting attorney general warned the White House that Flynn’s conduct had left him in a position in which he “essentially could be blackmailed” by Russian agents, according to Yates.

“To state the obvious, you don’t want your national security adviser compromised with the Russians,” she testified.

Trump removed Flynn from the highest-level security position 18 days later, and only after The Washington Post broke the news about the national security adviser’s false statements.

Was misguided loyalty on Trump’s part the reason that he did not act sooner? Or was Flynn, with his other Russian entanglements, somehow involved in the cyber espionage campaign by the Russians that used stolen emails from the Democratic campaign and fake news to undermine Hillary Clinton’s campaign?

Did the president recognize dumping him could leave Flynn vulnerable to being flipped by investigators into testifying about what went on in the Trump campaign? Flynn has indicated he is ready to talk in return for immunity. Comey won't be involved in making that offer. Trump made sure of that.

Consider what the White House fears. There is Paul Manafort, who for a time served as Trump’s campaign manager, and his connections to Russian oligarchs. Manafort helped manage the political rise in Ukraine of Viktor Yanukovych. Yanukovych became the country’s prime minister and was viewed by the U.S. intelligence officials as a puppet of Russian President Vladimir Putin, part of Putin’s plan to block Ukraine’s growing association with the West. Protests by the Ukrainian people drove Yanukovych from office.

Then there is Carter Page, a foreign policy adviser to the president and advocate for greater cooperation with Russia, and who met with the Russian ambassador during the Republican convention.

No one is above the law, not even a president. Congressional investigators can’t let the wizard’s diversions or the Comey firing throw them off the trail.