This is not a political scandal. The implications of unchecked abuses of executive power extend way beyond the battle for Congress in 2014. There are real public-policy issues at hand, such as making sure that citizens who try to obtain health-care coverage through Obamacare are not subject to the same selective abuse by unelected paper-pushers.

If the IRS can target and discriminate against one group of Americans, it can arbitrarily do it to anyone. This is an attack on the civil liberties of all Americans, and Congress needs to act now to make sure it never happens again.

So though this is a fine time to push the politics of scandal — because occasionally, politics is substantive — it would be more constructive for the GOP to push for tax and IRS reform.

The progressive answer to this is more rules and regulators, more agencies and safeguards and accountability projects. Republicans should recognize this intervention for the ridiculousness it is – creating more federal entities to watch over federal entities – and focus their arguments instead on the only solution which will actually work: removing power from the federal government and returning it to the states or the people. The only way to ensure that government doesn’t abuse a power is to make sure it doesn’t have this power in the first place.

What happened at the IRS is the government’s essential business. The IRS case deserves and calls out for an independent counsel, fully armed with all that position’s powers. Only then will stables that badly need to be cleaned, be cleaned. Everyone involved in this abuse of power should pay a price, because if they don’t, the politicization of the IRS will continue—forever. If it is not stopped now, it will never stop. And if it isn’t stopped, no one will ever respect or have even minimal faith in the revenue-gathering arm of the U.S. government again.

And it would be shameful and shallow for any Republican operative or operator to make this scandal into a commercial and turn it into a mere partisan arguing point and part of the game. It’s not part of the game. This is not about the usual partisan slugfest. This is about the integrity of our system of government and our ability to trust, which is to say our ability to function.