Those who colluded in the cover-up of Joe Biden’s cognitive decline are eager to put it behind them. The election is over, so why dwell on the past? Why not focus on more immediate problems, such as President Donald Trump’s continuing offenses against the civic order?

You can’t blame them for hoping, I suppose. But we can’t simply ignore such a shocking institutional failure. Nor can we put off the reckoning in sympathetic deference to Sunday’s announcement that the former president has aggressive metastatic prostate cancer.

I am sympathetic, terribly so, having watched my grandfather die after a decade-plus battle with the same disease. Biden and his family have my best wishes as they embark on a challenging fight. And oh, how I wish this announcement hadn’t come just before the release of Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s new book, “Original Sin,” which offers a devastating account of Biden’s decline and the extent of the White House cover-up.

Having read it over the weekend, I’m convinced that deep institutional soul-searching is due in many quarters, and that this conversation is too important to delay, even at the risk of adding to the Biden family’s distress. It is impossible to read “Original Sin” — especially in concert with “Fight,” a book released last month by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes — without reaching a horrifying conclusion: The most powerful nation in the world and its nuclear arsenal were left in the hands of a man who could not reliably recognize people he’d known for years, maintain his train of thought or speak in coherent sentences.

He could do those things some of the time, even most of the time, especially in the earlier years of his presidency. But not always. Unfortunately, the most important office in the world demands that its occupant always be ready to handle a crisis, every minute, for a full four years. The fate of humanity might depend on it.

Biden’s staff knew he wasn’t up to those demands, because they didn’t even trust him to handle a small fundraiser without a teleprompter. Yet instead of persuading him to step aside, or going public about this dangerous situation, they hid his condition from the nation. It was a near-treasonous dereliction of duty to their country.

There’s plenty of blame to go around, however, and no one should offer the excuse that the cover-up was too thorough for anyone to know. The signs were there, from the president’s curiously sparse public appearances to the videos of him acting confused. The gaslighting worked only because they had cooperation from within the Democratic Party, and I’m sorry to say, from my own profession.

Not everyone in my profession, to be sure. My colleague David Ignatius in 2023 urged Biden not to run again in part because of his age. Thompson was also early on this story, and in June last year, Annie Linskey and Siobhan Hughes of the Wall Street Journal published a devastating investigative report into Biden’s condition. But as a group, we didn’t just drop the ball. We flung it down with great vigor, even as video evidence of the president’s incapacity kept handing it back to us.

Though I aired concerns as early as 2022, I include myself in this condemnation. I can offer no good excuse for this kid-glove treatment. In my case, it wasn’t partisan, as many conservatives have suggested to me; though I voted for him, I did so reluctantly and rarely had anything good to say about his administration.

But my reasons for taking a soft line weren’t much better. I was stupidly afraid to say anything that smacked of too much ageism, even though age obviously matters in such a pitilessly demanding job. Even less to my credit, I was afraid to say something truly harsh while other journalists were still treading gingerly around the subject.

Well, now it’s time for all of us to grapple with those decisions because, as Thompson pointed out in a speech at the White House correspondents’ dinner, owning up to our collective mistakes is the only way to regain the public’s trust.

Just over a week after Thompson spoke, the Pulitzer Prizes were announced. Linskey and Hughes were not among the winners. They didn’t even make the list of finalists.

This omission smacks of my profession circling the wagons, creating yet another impenetrable bubble where we can reassure one another that what happened was fine, a perfectly understandable mistake — pretty much the excuses we made for Joe Biden himself. The only way out is to face the truth. The president was not fine, was not even within shouting distance of fine — and until we examine our own failure to report that fact, neither are we.