WASHINGTON (AP) -- When Rep. Christopher Cox was directing the investigation of Chinese spying last fall, the House was in a partisan uproar over the impeachment case against President Clinton. Indeed, some Republicans were counting on Cox to find new potential impeachment charges that would connect Chinese money to fund raising for the Clinton-Gore campaign. Tuesday, Cox was praised for doing the opposite: removing any trace of partisanship from the investigation and convincing four Republicans and four Democrats to join him in unanimously approving his select committee's report on Chinese espionage. ``Most of all I want to say to Chairman Cox, you did a first-rate job,'' said Rep. Norman Dicks of Washington state, the committee's ranking Democrat. Dicks said Cox conducted the investigation while ``the political environment ... was as partisan and as mean-spirited as I've seen it in 30 years here.'' Cox, 46, often thinks for a minute before making a public comment, and his statements usually have a scholarly air befitting a man who finished his undergraduate studies in three years and earned business and law degrees from Harvard. He speaks Russian. For enjoyment, he reads books on mathematics. But the six-term California Republican, a White House counsel in the Reagan administration, has his partisan streaks, too. He serves as chairman of the House Republican Policy Committee, which helps set the conservative GOP congressional agenda. And he has unleashed his fury against Democratic fund-raisers during hearings of the highly partisan Committee on Government Reform, the panel investigating illegal donations to the 1996 Clinton-Gore campaign, possibly by China. Cox told reporters Tuesday that he had a plan for the China committee to take the high ground, before producing its unanimous conclusion that Chinese espionage led to the theft of top-secret information about every U.S. nuclear weapon. ``We tried to leave our disagreements on the cutting room floor and put into this report those things that we agreed upon, because of the importance of that message, and the importance that we do something about it,'' he said. -=-=- 