The moral of the story, kids, is if your boss is too blinded by love to notice his robot girlfriend's glowing spine, don't lie under oath for him. It's not worth it.
The other moral of the story is that if your name is William Adama, you don't have to worry about the authority of independent tribunals. You can just call them witch hunts and then get your goons to arrest the chief investigator. Yay!
So basically this episode establishes the fact that marines will always, always obey the orders of the highest-ranking figure in their immediate vicinity, regardless of standing orders to the contrary (see also "Resistance" and "The Captain's Hand").
The story in a nutshell: there's another Number Five in the fleet that's been laying low all this time, only to surface and blow himself up now in a completely noncritical area. (If The Plan is to be believed, this particular Five is a blithering idiot, but he did suceed in kicking off a witch hunt, which is more than, oh, the other Two, the One, the Six, or even the Three managed to accomplish.) Hell, certain members of the Final Five have inadvertantly done more damage to the crew's morale than any self-aware Cylon infiltrator...
The blame seems to center on Chief Tyrol, whom Sgt. Hadrian suspects of being a Cylon agent. (So... it's safe to say that Hadrian was one of the mutineers, then.) The crew is lying for the chief, because he still hasn't stopped frakking his robot (and more importantly, officer) girlfriend. However, nobody bothered to check their stories beforehand, so everything quickly goes to hell. (Moral number three: always coordinate your lies! No wonder the Cylon models all only use one name each, except for Six. "I'm not Natalie, you idiot, I'm Caprica, whoops now everyone's looking at us funny," etc.)
So one guy, Socinus, takes the fall, and the Chief has to go out there on that deck, knowing that one of his men is in the brig because he couldn't keep his fly zipped, and the Chief breaks things off with Boomer because apparently he can keep his fly zipped. We just had Adama blow his lid in the previous episode when told to call off the SAR for Starbuck, and now he gives the Chief a masterful dressing-down; much more of this, Bill, and you could lose your father-figure status and have a mutiny on your hands...
But that's not until much, much later. Anyway, this is a lot better-paced than "Water" was, and there's no need to internalize the struggle here. So even though "Litmus" is probably my second-least-favorite episode of Season One, it's still pretty frakking good.
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