I know, it’s too easy.

The Washington Post reports:

A two-alarm fire broke out on the White House grounds Wednesday morning, sending 1,000 federal workers scurrying for safety and damaging Vice President Dick Cheney’s ceremonial suite in the historic Eisenhower Executive Office Building across the street from the West Wing.

Mr. Cheney was not there when the fire started about 9:15 a.m.; he and President Bush were in the White House Situation Room for an intelligence briefing. The two were informed of the blaze when they returned to the Oval Office, and later went outside together to shake the hands of firefighters who had responded.

And later:

The building’s centerpiece is the second-floor ceremonial office of the vice president, with two Belgian black marble fireplaces and wooden floors designed in a geometric pattern of mahogany, white maple and cherry. The office was used by 16 secretaries of the Navy beginning in 1879. In 1929, after a Christmas Eve fire damaged the West Wing, President Herbert Hoover moved in.

It’s too easy. Cheney was burning old CIA tapes. Cheney was incinerating files. Cheney was cleaning house, setting fire to all the “real” tapes out of Guantanamo.

The conspiracy theorist in me really believes that Dick just had someone torch the joint.  But the realist knows somewhere inside that the fire started for other reasons.

Or did it?

It’s far too easy.