Ladies and gentlemen, our long national nightmare is over.

On Friday, the Senate, after a little more than a month of presentation and discussion, voted to acquit President Bill Clinton on charges of perjury and obstructing justice.

There was much talk that the Senate would do the case justice, unlike the obviously partisan House of Representatives. Although only a handful of senators crossed party lines on the vote, there was a different sort of feeling after the vote came down.

The feeling is one of moving on — trying to repair our country after a year of mean-spirited politics — on both sides.

But, unfortunately, some Republicans don’t seem to want to let the matter go. All weekend long, every House manager who hadn’t gotten his two cents in was on Fox News or CNN, spinning the event to his liking.

Monday-morning quarterbacking isn’t going to make any of the issues surrounding this very complex matter clear.

Leave the spinning to the historians; it is time to heal the great divide and bring everybody back to the nation’s business.

And after the year of Monica, what exactly happened?

The unfortunate fact of the matter is that almost nobody came out of this scandal untarnished.

Clinton? His approval rating may be 70 percent, but there’s little doubt his place in history may be drastically altered.

Monica? The president’s former paramour may have done well in her grand jury deposition, but her life will never be the same. She’ll be chased after by gossip columnists and tabloids for the remainder of her life.

Kenneth Starr? The independent witchhunter’s approval ratings are on par with Saddam Hussein’s. A once-promising prosecutor who at one time may have been an excellent candidate for the Supreme Court will have Monicagate as an asterisk by his name for the remainder of his career.

The Republicans? They’re already sweating the year 2000 with the knowledge that the American people are not amused by their political tactics.

Linda Tripp? No way.

It’s ironic that the only people who have fared well throughout the whole ordeal are the American people.

They treated the “scandal” with a yawn and unlike every other pollster and spin doctor in Washington, relaxed, considered the issues at hand delicately and early on decided that the scandal was much ado about nothing.