Newspapers, magazines and television newscasts seem to think it's important. The U.S. Senate and U.S. House of Representatives voted to conduct hearings because they think there is something there. Special prosecutor Robert B. Fiske Jr. has subpoenaed many documents and at least 10 top Clinton administration officials -- making the Whitewater scandal a national issue.

Unlike previous governmental uproars -- such as Watergate and the Iran-Contra scandal -- government officials, investigators and the public aren't even sure what the Clintons are accused of doing. Aside from all the rumors of shredded documents and unethical loans, the Clintons have not been charged with any crimes and may never be charged with any wrongdoing.

Thus, Fiske's job will be to try to untangle the Whitewater knot --starting with the Clintons' dealings with James McDougal, chairman of the failed Madison Guaranty Savings & Loan and Whitewater investment partner. In January, Fiske, a Manhattan lawyer, was appointed by U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno to lead the Whitewater investigation.

The "questionable" Whitewater mystery really boils down to a real estate investment that Bill Clinton and Hillary Rodham Clinton made in the early 1980s -- an investment that involved 42 lots along the White River near Flippin in northern Arkansas. Unfortunately, potential buyers did not follow the sales brochure's advice -- "One weekend here and you'll never want to live anywhere else" -- because few bought lots in the forested real estate development.

In an effort to improve Whitewater sales, McDougal decided it would be effective to build a model house, so he loaned Hillary Clinton $30,000 to build, own and sell a three-bedroom ranch-style unit.

When the buyer later became insolvent, the Clintons bought the property out of bankruptcy and resold it in 1988 for $28,000 to its present owner. In 1991, the Clintons sold their remaining Whitewater share for $1,000 to partner McDougal. The venture's real estate broker, Chris Wade, and McDougal still own three acres of the Whitewater land.

After the sale, Vincent Foster, the Clintons' former lawyer and Hillary Clinton's former law partner, discovered that Whitewater had not filed tax returns for three years.

In July 1993, Foster, deputy to former White House counsel Bernard Nussbaum, was found dead in a Virginia park -- an apparent suicide. Following Foster's apparent suicide, Nussbaum and Maggie Williams, Hillary Clinton's aide, supposedly searched his office, took Whitewater-related documents and passed them on to the Clintons' personal attorney.

Now the Justice Department has prioritized subpoenaing all documents pertaining to sale of Whitewater lots, sending questions to Americans about the importance of the Clintons' investment. In December 1993, the Clintons agreed to turn over all Whitewater records. The White House admitted that documents were taken from Foster's office following his death in July.

During Bill Clinton's presidential campaign, the future president could not escape controversy -- from Gennifer Flowers to Whitewater. In March 1992, the media began questioning the Clintons' role in the investment in the Whitewater real estate venture.

In response to those questions, Bill Clinton's campaign released a report stating that the Clintons did not make a profit on the $69,000 investment. Although incomplete records prevented a full examination, the media seemed satisfied and allowed the subject to slide.

The Clintons continued to explain their business partnership with James and Susan McDougal's Whitewater to the media and the public by claiming they were simply passive investors. But now every transaction made during the Clintons' political sojourn in Little Rock has become a test of their character.

In Hillary Clinton's case, stories have emerged portraying her as a woman weeding through a series of messy connections, mismanaged finances and ethical dilemmas. For example, in 1986 Madison Guaranty was on the verge of bankruptcy and its leading officer, Harry Don Denton, was furious that a local savings and loan association had sold Madison Guaranty millions of dollars in bad loans.

At McDougal's suggestion, Denton turned to Hillary Clinton for assistance. After meeting with her for several hours, he helped her prepare the files for a lawsuit -- but the suit was never filed.

Despite meetings between Hillary Clinton and the opposing savings and loan, Denton learned that Hillary withdrew from the case after discovering her Rose Law Firm was already representing the other side. Hillary Clinton recognized the conflict of interest with the Denton case, but the Clintons were not so quick to realize the conflict with their relationship with McDougal and his wife, Susan McDougal.

The Clintons remained partners with the McDougals, who apparently drove Madison Guaranty into the ground at a cost of roughly $50 million to the taxpayers. Actually, Hillary Clinton represented Madison Guaranty in front of state regulators in an attempt to try to raise capital for the failing savings and loan by selling stock.

However, the stock deal never passed because federal regulators had jumped on Madison Guaranty, ousting McDougal as chairman in the vain hope of rescuing the savings and loan. McDougal was acquitted on fraud charges, but now faces investigation again.

Aside from the Clintons' dealings with McDougal, Denton claims that while he was an officer at Union Bank of Little Rock, he made out a personal loan of about $25,000 to Bill Clinton and McDougal to help pay for Whitewater acreage. Within two years, Denton recalls that the debt was paid off with proceeds from an unrelated loan made by Union Bank to both McDougal and Jim Guy Tucker, Clinton's successor for governor.

Another revelation involves a $300,000 loan from Capitol Savings Management, a federally sponsored lending company, to Susan McDougal, part of which was diverted into Whitewater. At the time, Capitol Savings Management was owned by David L. Hale, a Clinton-appointed judge. Capitol Savings also made a large loan to Tucker.

The purpose of Capitol Savings is to provide loans to "socially or economically disadvantaged persons" -- hardly the way to describe Bill Clinton, Tucker or McDougal. Hale was indicted in September for fraud and has accused Bill Clinton of pressuring him to make the McDougal loan. The Clintons deny exerting any pressure or knowing about the diversion of funds into Whitewater.

Last week, in the first plea bargain struck by Fiske, Hale pleaded guilty to unrelated bank and mail charges for defrauding the Small Business Administration. The guilty plea allows Hale to avoid a trial that was scheduled to begin last week and to present his charges about Bill and Hillary Clinton to the Whitewater grand jury sitting in Little Rock.

Last fall, Jean Hanson, general counsel at the Treasury Department, informed Nussbaum that the Clintons would be named in an inquiry by the Resolution Trust Corporation, the federal agency cleaning up the savings and loan mess. Deputy Treasury Secretary Roger Altman, a friend of the Clintons, belonged to the RTC board.

But after facing heavy criticism, Altman removed himself from all matters relating to Madison Guaranty or Whitewater, including his position as head of RTC. Unfortunately, resignations have become commonplace lately with this administration.

The day following his subpoena, Nussbaum was forced to resign as White House counsel and was replaced by Lloyd Cutler as Nussbaum's interim replacement. Last week, Webster L. Hubbell, a close friend of the Clintons, quit as the third-ranking official at the Justice Department. He blamed a dispute over his billing practices at his former law firm for distracting him and hurting his family.

Following weeks of intense Whitewater pressure, Bill and Hillary Clinton finally released all their tax returns since 1977, providing a 16-year picture of their finances.

Bill and Hillary had already released their tax returns from 1980 to the present. But when the Clintons' tax returns for 1977-1979 were released at the White House last Friday, they showed that:

-- During the years Bill Clinton served as Arkansas attorney general and was first elected as the state's governor, the Clintons invested $46,636 into their Whitewater real estate investment, mostly for interest on bank loans.

-- Hillary made about $100,000 in commodity speculations.

-- The couple's income over the full 16-year period increased from slightly more than $40,000 in 1977 to a little more than $250,000 in 1992.

The returns broke little new ground, and even reinforced the Clintons' recent descriptions of their transactions -- including their insistence that they lost money on their Whitewater land investment.

But on the surface, the returns do not show whether or not money from McDougal's Madison Guaranty found its way improperly into either the Whitewater land company or into Clinton's 1984 gubernatorial re-election campaign. The transactions are being analyzed by Fiske and are likely to be the focus of congressional hearings later this spring.

In the most recent turn of events, the White House announced Monday that they would stand behind presidential aide George Stephanopoulos, who, along with White House official Harold Ickes, challenged a government agency's hiring of a former Republican prosecutor to probe the failed Arkansas savings and loan that is now at the center of the Whitewater investigation. President Clinton said Stephanopoulos is not in danger of losing his job over this incident.

Now all Americans can do over the next several weeks is sit back and wait. Although the Clintons have not been charged with any wrongdoing, Congress pushed for hearings and now it has them. But the longer Whitewater lingers, the more voters will be bombarded with the fact that the Clintons might have been involved in the scandal.

And the longer it takes until officials in Washington can get back to business.

This report was compiled with information from Time Magazine, Newsweek, U.S. News & World Report, The New York Times, The Associated Press and The Washington Post.