John Podhoretz explains for New York Post readers why the disturbing news about the recent White House intruder fits with an even more disturbing pattern of recent events.

An intruder made his way across the White House lawn and through the building almost to the Obama living quarters before being stopped by a Secret Service officer who was off duty: This chilling news is more than just a kind of melodramatic movie scenario come true.

Next to the military, the Secret Service is probably the most highly regarded institution within the executive branch. Or it was.

Now we learn its agents can’t catch a guy running across the White House lawn; can’t stop the guy at the front door; can’t get to him before he gets to the stairs that lead to the rooms where the president’s daughters sleep.

Which raises a simple question: If not the Secret Service, who? Whom can we trust to do a decent job in DC?

This fiasco — and the news, long covered up, that the White House was hit by several bullets back in 2011 — isn’t just a problem for the Secret Service and its present management.

This seems to crystallize a more general feeling that stretches from Washington to the far reaches of the globe — the feeling that things are spinning wildly out of control and there’s no one even minimally competent enough at the highest reaches of American power to calm the gathering storm. …

… Congress deserves the scorn it receives from the public; its approval rating is somewhere around 15 percent.

But incompetence isn’t the cause of gridlock; rather, gridlock is the result of passionate and profound disagreements. Nor is gridlock caused by confusion; everybody knows perfectly well what is going on.

The same can’t be said of the administration, which is awash in incompetence and confusion, much of it deliberate. Consider:

In the past week, the question has arisen whether the president refused to acknowledge the rise of ISIS over the past year or whether the intelligence community underestimated the threat.

Either the president is right and the intelligence community has presided over its worst failure since the Iraq war, or he’s wrong (or lying) and simply closed his eyes to a situation he did not wish to see. No matter which is true, it’s a disaster.