The Benghazi attack should humble us. Not just because our ambassador and three aides were killed, but because all of us — even those who thought they were uncovering the truth behind a lie — were wrong about what happened.

In the days after the assault, spokesmen for the Obama administration linked it to an anti-Muslim video that had triggered riots around the world. Republicans accused the administration of drawing this conclusion because it suited Obama’s worldview. It reduced the attack to a matter of diplomacy and, in Mitt Romney’s words, “apologizing.” Liberals had rushed to believe what they wanted to believe.

As early accounts of a protest at the consulate collapsed, Republicans substituted their own story. The video, they explained, was irrelevant. Instead, the attack had been plotted by allies of al-Qaida to coincide with the anniversary of 9/11. This story, too, suited the worldview of its advocates. It reduced the Benghazi incident to a matter of security, warfare and refusing to apologize. And, like the protest story, it has unraveled.

The intelligence from Libya was confused all along. The attack took place in the midst of uprisings against the video across the Muslim world, aimed particularly at U.S. embassies. The rage, though real, was ignited and stoked by anti-American extremists. That’s how it often is with mob violence: One man’s motivation is another man’s pretext. In Benghazi, witnesses saw attackers and onlookers. The problem was figuring out the relationship between them. The CIA’s initial assessments suggested a hybrid scenario: a protest “spontaneously inspired by the protests at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo” that “evolved into a direct assault” by extremists.

If you look back at the administration’s early statements, you’ll see signs of this uncertainty. Spokesmen talked about the video in the context of the Muslim riots generally. On Sept. 14, ABC’s Jake Tapper asked White House Press Secretary Jay Carney whether this was true in Benghazi. “We certainly don’t know,” said Carney. In her now-infamous tour of the Sunday talk shows on Sept. 16, U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice parroted CIA assessments, asserting that a protest at the consulate “seems to have been hijacked” by “extremists who came with heavier weapons.” On Sept. 18, Carney repeated that the video had “caused the unrest in Cairo” and “precipitated some of the unrest in Benghazi.” But he added, “What other factors were involved is a matter of investigation.” On Sept. 20, Obama said protests over the video “were used as an excuse by extremists to see if they can also directly harm U.S. interests.”

On Sept. 26, Libya’s president, Mohammed Magarief, told NBC News that the video “has nothing to do with this attack.” But he offered no evidence other than the sophistication of the weapons and tactics. A week later, a former intelligence chief for the Libyan rebels echoed Magarief’s assertion, but again added no evidence.

The Obama administration’s story began to shift during a State Department conference call on Oct. 9, when a reporter asked what had “led officials to believe for the first several days that this was prompted by protests against the video.” A department official replied, “That was not our conclusion.” This was a renunciation of the protest story, not the video’s relevance. But nobody noticed. The right-wing mediasphere erupted with cries of vindication that the video had “nothing to do” with the attack. The next day, Rep. Darrell Issa, chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, opened a hearing on the controversy by falsely claiming the State Department had denied that “this assault was part of a reaction to a video or the like.” Issa offered his own single-cause theory: “In fact, it was September 11th . . . It was that anniversary that caused an organization aligned with al-Qaida to attack and kill our personnel.”