Vindictive ex-wives or husbands, aggrieved business partners, disgruntled bureaucrats, jealous colleagues, people passed over for promotion, the embittered, the malicious and self-aggrandizing gossips are all excellent sources of information. Sure, it comes with baggage and needs to be handled with skepticism — which is the journalistic equivalent of asbestos gloves. It may sound a little seedy, but contented, discreet, loyal, unconflicted people hardly ever inform on others, violate confidences or betray.

Welcome to the real world.

If it seems slightly unfamiliar, that's because, since Tuesday, we've all been immersed in an increasingly otherworldly discussion over the revelation that "Deep Throat" — the ur-source — is W. Mark Felt, a 91-year-old former deputy associate director of the FBI. Felt may be little known to all but the Watergate obsessed, but his nom de guerre has become a generic category. His identity was one of the longest and most closely held secrets in the history of American journalism, so the occasion is drenched in drama — and, as is so often the case these days, nonsense.

Take, for example, the strange debate over whether Felt is a hero who saved the republic from a Nixonian putsch, or a villain who betrayed his oath as a federal law-enforcement official. This discussion takes place on a planet where there only are good guys and bad guys, where all motives are unmixed, wholly pure or malign.

W. Mark Felt

"But wasn't Deep Throat a hero?"

"That's not my view at all," Felt said. "It would be contrary to my responsibility as a loyal employee of the FBI to leak information."

Thirty years ago, Felt was a man passed over for promotion, apparently unhappy that Richard Nixon had selected an outsider, L. Patrick Gray, to succeed J. Edgar Hoover. Felt also was concerned that the administration was attempting to "politicize" the bureau and resentful that the FBI's own inquiry into the Watergate break-in was being obstructed by the White House and its political operatives.

Still, it's hard to imagine how anyone who had risen through the FBI in the Hoover era could have balked at politicization. Reactionary politics, spying, intimidation of elected officials and playing fast and loose with the Constitution were the bureau's stock in trade throughout those years. Felt was a bureau insider, somebody in a position to know everything except, perhaps, the name of Hoover's favorite millinery shop.

Former FBI officials W. Mark Felt, left, and Edward S. Miller appeared at a news conference in 1981 after learning that President Reagan had pardoned them from their conviction of unauthorized break-ins during the Nixon administration's search for opponents during the Vietnam War. AP library photo • April 15, 1981

And yet he did, and he did it when it counted. That he almost surely did it for a mixture of reasons, self-interested and principled, matters not at all. For all we know, his personal opinion of his conduct and his explanation to himself for why he did what he did probably has changed many times over the years.

Real lives are like that.

One of the things that has lent the past few days' discussion a particularly surreal dimension has been the denunciation of Felt by various convicted Watergate felons, who have been allowed to reinvent themselves as commentators.

The burglar G. Gordon Liddy claimed Felt had "dishonored himself." We'll leave it to more capacious minds to contemplate what "honor" might consist of in Liddy's moral universe.

Pat Buchanan, bully and bigot — though not a felon — described Felt as "a snake."

But the utter-absence-of-irony award has to go to former Nixon chief counsel turned evangelical preacher, Charles Colson, who gravely noted that Felt "had the trust of America's leaders and to think that he betrayed that trust is hard to fathom."

Before he found God, and a lucrative second career, behind bars, Colson was the guy who memorably announced that he "would run over my own grandmother" to ensure Nixon's re-election. This week, William Neikirk and Mike Dorning of the Chicago Tribune had the nifty idea of going back through the infamous White House tapes to listen for mentions of Felt. One of the things they turned up was a conversation in which Colson urged Felt to order FBI agents interrogating the man who had attempted to assassinate Gov. George Wallace to pursue the idea that the shooting was somehow linked to Sen. Edward Kennedy.

"Be sure you push that, Mark," Colson demanded, "just to be certain that they ask those kind of questions, you know, to get that kind of information."

There's nothing "hard to fathom" about Colson — not then, not now.

In an online chat Thursday, Ben Bradlee, who was The Washington Post's executive editor during Watergate and for 30 years joined reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein in holding secret Felt's identity, was asked whether he ever was concerned about Deep Throat's motives.

"Everybody who talks to a newspaper has a motive," Bradlee wrote. "That's just a given. And good reporters always — repeat always — probe to find out what that motive is. In Felt's case, it seemed obvious that he was concerned about abuses of power coming from people who worked for the president. Including his highest advisers, including the attorney general of the United States, and that seemed a totally decent motive."

More important, whatever his motive, W. Mark Felt told the truth.