(FORTUNE Magazine) – The summer's Moneygate hearings may be the best theater Washington has to offer this year. All the classic elements are there: Greed. Envy. Ambition. Pride. Lies. Cover-ups. Also cover-ups of cover-ups.

But the real drama is not on your television screen; it's behind the scenes. On television and in the hearing room, there is the usual surface formality, broken by occasional unscripted moments. In truth, investigators have no idea where these hearings are going. On your screen you see the usual congressional conviviality. In truth, the principals barely speak to each other. Onscreen the lawmakers are squarely behind reform. In private they'd rather not do a damn thing.

If these hearings have any value, it won't be whether the Republicans are able to show what the Democrats did (or vice versa), but whether the public understands what the politicians of both parties did--and are doing still. The value won't be to shine light on a dark--and possibly unlawful--episode but to show the shocking extent of big money's stranglehold on politics. "If these things are successful, they will build a public record on just what the Lincoln bedroom scenes and Washington games did and how politicians put the government up for sale," says Fred Wertheimer, a former president of Common Cause.

This is high-stakes stuff, especially because the hearings are meant to be more than a television spectacle. They're supposed to be a prologue to overhauling the campaign-finance system. So there will be maneuvering aplenty, as Republicans and Democrats scramble to protect aspects of the system in which they have an advantage. Democrats really don't want to limit their ability to raise "soft money," unregulated contributions given to parties, not candidates; they figure it's the only area of fundraising where they're remotely competitive with the GOP. Republicans don't want to relinquish the ability to raise and spend private and corporate money; they know they have a real advantage there. Indeed, the earnest folks in the hearing room share a silent conspiracy. They know that the only beneficiaries of the current rules are the 535 members of Congress who have harnessed the system and ridden it to election. Their real goal is to satisfy the public by appearing to support change, and to satisfy their colleagues by preserving the system that brought them all to office in the first place.

This is dangerous territory for the individual with the most at stake, Senator Fred Thompson of Tennessee, the onetime actor who hopes to catapult himself into the front ranks of Republican presidential contenders three years from now. As counsel to the Senate Watergate committee's dramatic 1973 hearings, Thompson knows that high-profile congressional hearings have the ability to make or break political leaders. They turned Estes Kefauver, J. William Fulbright, and Sam Ervin into national figures. They helped Harry Truman and Peter Rodino show they weren't hopeless hacks. But there were no heroes in the Iran-contra hearings, and the Army-McCarthy hearings began Joe McCarthy's inevitable slide to oblivion and obloquy. There doesn't have to be a hero in a hearing. If this latest round is merely a way for politicians to attack each other while preserving the system, then there won't be one this summer either.

DAVID SHRIBMAN is Washington bureau chief of the Boston Globe and a Pulitzer Prize-winning political reporter.