Joseph Wilson - radical partisan Democrat?

I just read, for the first time, Joseph Wilson's op-ed piece that led to the leaking of his wife Valerie Plame's identity as a CIA agent. After a week of hearing pundits on tv and in the press talking about how Wilson's critique of the administration's pre-war intelligence was just a baseless partisan attack, I would have expected the article to be a vitriolic invective denigrating President Bush. It's not. Nor does it seem partisan.

Which leads me to agree with Frank Rich, who argues in his NYT editorial Follow the Uranium, that Wilson is:

a MacGuffin, which, to quote the Oxford English Dictionary, is "a particular event, object, factor, etc., initially presented as being of great significance to the story, but often having little actual importance for the plot as it develops."

The Washington Post summarizes what this is really about.