I don't know that I'll ever understand this mentality. You can be good at your job *and* cheat on your wife. Furthermore, you can even be a decent guy and cheat on your wife, though I’m sure there are plenty of people out there who will disagree with me. It's a bigger issue when someone stands on a moral soapbox and then practices what he preaches against. I understand in this day and age it's difficult, maybe even impossible, to separate one's private life from one's public life, for better or worse. And though I don't think it wise to say "Whores bad," in public whilst secretly sticking your hand up a whore's skirt, it’s certainly not surprising. I don’t care that he cheated on his wife. Maybe their marriage is a sham. Maybe she’s a jerk. Maybe he’s a complete and worthless cad. I don't know, I'll never know, and I don't care; it's not my marriage. And I'm certainly not going to judge a marriage when I'm not exactly the marrying kind.

And I'm not advocating lying to and or cheating on your spouse, but marriage and/or cohabitation isn't easy and most people, IMO, are going to suck at it from time to time, albeit to varying degrees. But judging someone's ability to serve in office based on whether he or she can remain monogamous seems ludicrous to me. Lots of politicians have cheated, are cheating and will cheat, and whether they are crappy in office or not probably has nothing to do with the cheating. An infidelity doesn’t automatically make someone a crap politician or a crap human being.

I agree with scaegles that an elected official who chooses to violate an existing law is in the wrong, and maybe that makes him a bad politician. You can’t enforce a law by breaking it and you look like a schmuck. At the same time, I agree with Alex, too; I don't think prostitution should be illegal, so don't really have a problem with someone breaking that particular law. Dilemma.

The issue here isn’t what sort of man he is at home, but what sort of man he is in public.

Also, screwing a whore and then screwing her over by screaming VICE, VICE, VICE, makes him a crap human being. Heh. I care about the prostitutes. I want them all to be happy like the very real - not at all faking their happiness for the cameras - ladies on HBO’s Cat House.

I disagree with a lot of what you say, but the issue here isn't the sex. It's the money. I doubt New York will go after him for solicitation, and if he's indicted by the feds it probably won't be for a Mann act violation. It will be for bank fraud, illegal structuring of cash transactions, money laundering, etc.

To the extent he resigned because the incident tainted his reputation, it wasn't because he had marital lapses. It was because he had very expensive, Neroesque marital lapses. It's a tone deafness that makes John Edwards's $400 haircut seem sober.

I"m just blown away by being able to spend $80k on prostitutes - Dang, I with I had an extra 80K - of course I suppose at $1k/hour it translates into one massive 2-week bender- but I still bet I could have way more fun on that kind of money and have hedons to share.

The man shows all the signs of being a sex addict, and hopefully this will shake him into getting help for that.

I just laugh. I've been following his zealotry for awhile and wondered if something like this might happen.

2 weeks? With the right drugs, you could squeeze it into four days and still have time for a nice sit-down dinner.

I move away from Albany, then all the fun starts...

As I get older, I find that the nice meal starts to play a more important part of that opportunity.