On the face of it, this last defeat is puzzling, since the issue seemed especially suited to the merging of the political and the personal - all personal choices are political, and all political choices are really personal, a matter of comparative morality. In opposition to the supreme evil of war, their own supreme goodness could only shine the brighter.

Why did they fail? Let us take as our text the anti-war writings of Gerry Caplan, former national secretary of the NDP. If this seems overly personal, he started it: the politics of sanctimony, as I mentioned last time, is rooted in a total obsession with one's own emotional condition. Caplan's columns in consequence read less like a history of the war than a medical record.

The week before war began, Caplan reported, ''Everyone I know is sick at heart . . . agonizing . . . helpless.'' He himself was ''mortified by Brian Mulroney's role. . . It makes me ashamed of the entire human race.'' Not only that, ''I was outraged, sickened, frustrated . . .''and so forth.

On Jan. 20, it was more of the same. ''Like everybody I know, I'm twitchy, frustrated, anxious, depressed.'' By the next week, the symptoms had spread to the rest of the body. Along with the usual ''agonizing,'' Caplan reported a turned stomach, chilled blood and a sick heart.

In this state of advanced self-absorption, it was understandable that the sanctimonious should fail to see they weren't really putting their case very well. Indeed, they violated almost every rule of persuasion. Most of us learn these early on: don't overstate your case; don't impugn your opponent's motives; admit when you're mistaken; and, above all, keep a sense of humor about you. These are as much self-interest as common decency. If you wish to fight on the field of reason, arm yourself as the Sweet Knight of Calm Reflection.

The aim of sanctimony, rather, is to obliterate reason as a guide altogether. Deliberate overstatement is hence the first rule to follow. We saw enough of this in the free trade debate: that the top job in the country would be sales manager, that nuclear-tipped ICBMs would be installed on Baffin Island, that Canadian women would be forced to become surrogate mothers.

And in the run-up to the gulf war, there were likewise predictions of ''one of the greatest cataclysms of our time . . . incalculable geopolitical destabilization . . . the potential escalation of both nuclear and chemical and biological weapons.'' (G. Caplan, op. cit.) One expert testified that as many as three million people would be killed. Impugning motives was, of course, de rigueur - as it always is - although this only really reached a crescendo after the fact. In two titanic postwar columns, classics of their kind, Caplan endeavored to transform defeat into a kind of victory. The war not being quite the cataclysm he'd been banking on, the whole thing could clearly only have been a White House conspiracy - in fact, ''a fiendish, cynical, warped conspiracy.''

Of course! The Americans knew they'd only lose 28 men, right from the start! They knew they could keep public opinion, and Congress, and Western Europe, and the Soviets, and the Arabs, and Israel on side, all along! And why? To establish ''an international economic environment . . . for the direct benefit of U.S. corporations.'' Competitiveness, indeed. Take that, Japan! The clear lesson to be drawn from this is that Caplan is never wrong. Not that there was ever any doubt, although with fewer and fewer allies, Gerry was plainly troubled, acknowledging his ''shame and incomprehension at the failure of socialist governments in western Europe to stand up for sanctions.'' Alas, the martyr: betrayed on all sides.

Finally, sanctimony depends on the maintenance at all times of a posture of High Seriousness. This can sometimes be tedious. But most of the time it's irresistibly comic. ''You're the luckiest nine-year-old in the world,'' Gerry chanced to say to his son one day on the hockey rink. No, Gerry has the child replying: ''Nine-year-old kids over there will be the luckiest in the world if there's no war.''

The mixture of paranoia and pomposity could succeed as long as it did - terrorizing politicians, monopolizing debate, enforcing a false and rigid consensus - only so long as it was never challenged. Once opposed, like all bullies, it retreated. Once exposed, like all confidence games, it collapsed.