Ray McGovern lays out the reasons why Chimpco's deceptions matter:

The focus on the State of the Union address is almost a red herring. I'll tell you what I mean by that. It's bad enough that the president did say that it was quite wrong, but he said it. But that pales in significance to the reality that that forgery, the information from that forgery, was used deliberately knowing it was a forgery in September and October to frighten our duly elected representatives and senators into approving a resolution empowering a president to make war on another country. That is incredibly complex incredibly grave constitutional crisis, when the administration deliberately uses false evidence, evidence it knows to be false to trick essentially our elected representatives into seating their power, on declaring war and saying yes, Mr. President, we're frightened enough. We hear all about this mushroom cloud and the people have, too. We will give you the right to wage war even though there's no provocation. That is I can outline, I don't want to take up too much time, I can outline how that all happened. Basically in a nutshell they didn't have anything else. The Al Qaeda thing, they didn't have because the Central Intelligence Agency analysts to their great credit refused to contrive connections between Iraq and Al Qaeda. They didn't have much on bio or chemical warfare, because the D.I.A., the Defense Intelligence analysts to their credit, said there's no reliable sources on these things. The aluminum tubes--that argument bent as easily as aluminum bends, so they couldn't use that either. So as they looked around for something to persuade Congress to authorize a war, they dusted off these documents known to be forgeries and said, before anybody finds out about the forgery, we can, number one, get the resolution to approve the war. Number two, we can have our war. Number three, we can relish the victory. And who's going to care if part of the rationale was based on a forgery, when we have a victory. And that's the fatal miscalculation. Because the press and American people do care when they're lied to. That's what we're seeing playing out right now.