WHAT do we know about Andrea Yates? We know she bore five children. We know that she suffered from postpartum depression and psychosis. We know that the antipsychotic drug Haldol brought her back to herself.

We know that she and her husband had a fifth child despite her illness. We know that she fell into another postpartum crisis and, in a rare moment when she was alone with them, killed Noah, John, Paul, Luke and Mary.

We also know how she did it. We know she drowned them, one by one. We know she had to run after the older children, who realized they were in danger. We know that in at least two of the five murders, it took the child somewhere between three and six minutes to die.

We know that when she was done, she called the police. She confessed her crimes in a deliberate and thorough manner, and, according to the jurors, it was the nature of the confession itself that led them to believe she knew right from wrong despite her madness.

Now there seems to be almost a unanimous body of opinion that the jury’s guilty verdict was a terrible miscarriage of justice. Even conservatives who have written powerfully against the culture of excuses are stunned. Charles Kraut-hammer and Sally Satel, both trained psychiatrists, have written that Andrea Yates’ delusions were emanations from a mind so diseased that she could not be considered responsible for her murders.

“She clearly knew that what she did was illegal,” Krauthammer wrote. “And prohibited. And would cause her to be punished. But in the grip of a fantastic psychosis, she actually thought it was right. She thought she was saving her children from a worse fate, in this world and the next.”

What was Yates’ fantastic psychosis? It was, we are told, that she believed her children were going bad and that to save them she had to murder them. In Satel’s words: “Her choice was not to kill them or let them live happy lives. It was kill them or else subject them to horrifying damnation at the hands of Satan.”

There’s a troubling flaw at the heart of this analysis of Yates’ psychosis. Judging from what we know of this case, she did not believe that the devil was inside her children, which is a common psychosis. She was convinced the devil had marked her with the “666” sign. She believed that they were going down the path to Hell because of her bad mothering.

She believed, in other words, that the devil had claimed her for the purpose of claiming her children.

So, was she saving them, in her eyes, by killing them as Krauthammer and Satel suppose? I’m not sure. The same purpose would have been better served by her killing herself.

Try for a minute to understand the terms of Yates’ delusion. She evidently believed she was evil, not the children. So why did they have to die for them to be saved?

Forget law for a minute. The psychotic Yates did not think the children were yet evil, just that they were heading in that direction under her tutelage. By killing them rather than herself, she was actually taking the easy way out.

She was not doing the right thing according to the rules of her own delusions, as Satel and Krauthammer suggest. They were not devils. They were still innocents.

A close reading of Yates’ own madness suggests there was another path for her besides child murder, a path she chose not to take. In killing them, therefore, Andrea was doing the wrong thing in the terms of her own dementia. And that’s what the jury knew, when its 12 members decided she should be considered responsible for her actions.

Jurors acknowledge she was insane. But they found reason to believe Andrea Yates knew killing her children was wrong and that she did it anyway

Hard cases, as always, make bad law. A not-guilty-by-reason-of-insanity verdict would have been eminently understandable. But the jurors who found Andrea Yates guilty were not themselves guilty of some evil. They looked at this unspeakable crime and made a judgment that cannot be so easily dismissed.

E-mail: podhoretz@nypost.com