Last week I was reminded again of the sage observations that real life generates stories that no fiction writer could ever imagine.  Who would have thought that the prosecutor who went after prostitution rings would fall with lightening speed precisely because he was involved with the kind of ring in his previous role as attorney general of New York?  To his credit he stepped down swiftly after his sky-high hypocrisy rendered him politically impotent.  What made this sex scandal different the Lewinsky affair or senator Craig’s airport arrest was that from beginning to end it only took 48 hours. Spitzer in my mind was even more reckless than Clinton.  Clinton only jeopardized being an effective president while the Republicans were trying to use Lewinsky affair to throw people out of office.  Clinton stayed and continued to be a high popular elder statesman until he momentarily became the bulldog for his wife’s pre-presidential bid.  But Spitzer threw-away his entire political career that might have led to the presidency for 22-year old hooker. Unlike many other politicians, he already had a beautiful wife.  Why? Why are politicians often so reckless?   N. R. Kleinfield of the NY Times provides some answers.

Politics, and Scandal, as Usual
By N. R. KLEINFIELD (March 11, 2008)
It keeps happening. Recklessly, shamelessly, cavalierly—as if this time they’re the ones who will somehow manage to get away with it all.
But many of them don’t.
Congressmen, senators, governors, presidents, mayors—politicians at all levels keep starring in this familiar and non-partisan soap opera rerun. They engage in clandestine sexual entanglements, commonly cloaked in the tawdry textures of hotel pseudonyms and airport bathrooms and pay-by-the-hour copulation. All too often, their stealthy frolics then poison their political careers.
And now add to the lengthening list Gov. Eliot Spitzer, husband, father of three teenage daughters, who authorities on Monday said had been involved with a ring of prostitutes.
“I think biologists could tell you this has something to do with natural selection — the person who acquires power becomes the alpha male,” said Tom Fiedler, who teaches a course in press and politics at Harvard’s Kennedy School. He was involved in reporting Gary Hart’s notorious fling with Donna Rice in 1987 that terminated the senator’s presidential bid.
Politics and sex is an old story, and as Mr. Fiedler and others point out, it simply reinforces the lessons of the aphrodisiac of power taught in Shakespeare. Its prime characters constitute a crowded society.
Governor Spitzer’s startling appearance with his wife, Silda, at his side is itself something of a contrapuntal answer to New Jersey’s 2004 entry in this dubious catalog of political misbehavior, Gov. James E. McGreevey’s relinquishing office after disclosing a gay affair.
By now, many of the more publicized escapades have become embedded in political lore, from President Bill Clinton encounters with Monica Lewinsky to Senator Bob Packwood and his unwanted advances on women to Representative Mark Foley and his lewd e-mails to House pages.
Who can forget the late Wilbur D. Mills, the one-time powerful head of the House Ways and Means Committee, and his dalliances back in 1974 with the stripper Fanne Foxe? She’s the one who barreled out of Mr. Mills’s car and waded into the Tidal Basin in Washington when the park police stopped them. Enterprisingly, she went and changed her name from the Argentine Firecracker to the Tidal Basin Bombshell, and got a book out of her adventures.
There was, as well, Representative Gary Condit, whose career imploded when it came out that he had been involved with Chandra Levy, an intern who was murdered. And Wayne Hays, the Ohio representative, who quit in 1976 after it was revealed that the job requirements of Elizabeth Ray were less as a secretary than as his mistress. In her famous words: “I can’t type. I can’t file. I can’t even answer the phone.”
Sexual missteps among politicians are nothing peculiar to the United States, having firm grounding in England, for instance, and turning up with good regularity throughout the world. But they seem to reach more absurdist proportions in this country, and have almost the quality of a catch-me-if-you-can game at a time when private borders have gotten extremely porous.
“There is a broader anxiety about what is private anymore,” said Paul Apostolidis, a political science professor at Whitman College and the co-editor of the book “Public Affairs: Politics in the Age of Sex Scandals.” “It’s not that politicians are behaving more badly. We’re just learning about it more often.”
But why does it go on repeatedly when the ramifications can be so dire?
“I don’t see why we would expect politics to be more free of the psychological contradictions of other humans beings,” Mr. Apostolidis said. “People do self-destructive things that are not rational.”
Psychologists mention the sense of entitlement felt by those who attain political standing that blinds them to the consequences of their actions. And they say that ambitious politicians are invigorated by risk and feel impervious.
Dr. Frank Farley, a psychologist at Temple University, said that many politicians are what he calls Type T personalities, with T standing for thrill-seeking. “Politics is an uncertain business,” he said. “You’re at the whim of the electorate. There’s no tenure. It’s often hard to know what the criteria for success are. It’s either all or nothing — you either win or you lose. And so it inspires a risk-taking person to go into that line of work. But on the public side, they’re supposed to show stability and responsibility, and so this risky nature may show itself more on the private side.”
Despite the intensified scrutiny of politicians in recent times, and the ongoing parade of those who do get caught, Dr. Farley said public officials keep acting recklessly because their nature is hard to restrain. “It’s deep,” he said. “It’s very hard to throttle back.”
Dr. Judy Kuriansky, an adjunct professor of clinical psychology at Columbia University’s Teachers College, said that “sex and power are extremely connected, because they’re basically an expression of this huge energy that these people have.”
Not uncommonly, she said, politicians speak out vigorously against the very behavior that they then indulge in, as is the case with Governor Spitzer. “You project wrong onto others that is symptomatic of your own behavior,” she said. “It’s called a defense mechanism. Basically, it’s unconscious.”
Moreover, she added, “Even though Spitzer is a lawyer, when you get into a position of power, you think you’re above the law.”
Some secrets do in fact have long lives. Not until 2004, three decades afterward, did it come out that Neil Goldschmidt, who became governor of Oregon in the 1980s, had sexually abused a 14-year-old babysitter while he was mayor of Portland.
Well, what could Oregon legislators do at that point? They took his official portrait and hung it in a less visible spot in the state capitol.
Not always, of course, are political careers ruined by sexual irregularities. Rep. Barney Frank continued to win re-election in Massachusetts even after it was disclosed in 1989 that he had hired a male prostitute who ran a brothel out of his apartment.
It is sometimes speculated that certain politicians, at least subconsciously, want to be caught and have their careers upended. But do they?
“I’ve never seen it,” said Dr. Farley. “I don’t believe it’s a factor with these people. It’s just in their nature to push things. I don’t think they have a death wish. I think they have a life wish. They just love all aspects of life — some of it too much.”

And here is another interesting article on women have responded to the Spitzer scandal.

Public Infidelity, Private Debate: Not My Husband (Right?)
By JAN HOFFMAN NY Times (March 16, 2008)

WHAT type of infidelity is forgivable in a marriage? What triggers an exit strategy?
So ran at least one of the many hair-splitting strains of mesmerized chatter this week among women, especially current and former wives in the New York area, as they watched yet another pale, drawn woman standing by her husband’s side, trying to withstand the gale force winds of his sex scandal.
What will she do next? Leave?
Stay? For how long?
If my husband hired a prostitute? the chatter went. Awful. But he could redeem himself.
If he had an affair? You mean, like love? We’re done.
Conversely:
An affair? We were married 19 years and had two kids! Horrendous. Lots of therapy. And time. We got past it.

An escort service? Kinky sex? Forget it, that would be the end.
The traumas of domestic life, writ large when they strike families in the public eye, inevitably become templates onto which private people project their anxieties. The recurrence of Elizabeth Edwards’s breast cancer while her husband was running for the Democratic presidential nomination became a flash point for families struggling with illness and hope.
The pregnancy of Jamie Lynn Spears, the 16-year-old sister of Britney Spears, provoked a kind of national agita in the homes of her young fans, as parents held forth about abstinence, abortion and adoption, to say nothing of the child-rearing skills of teenagers.
The latest model is the familial crisis facing Silda Wall Spitzer, corporate lawyer, mother of three daughters and, most pointedly, wife of Gov. Eliot Spitzer, who resigned after revelations that he had been paying for prostitutes. In conversations and throughout the blogosphere, wives at great remove have imagined what they would do if they were in her shoes, even as they hastened to add that those shoes would never, ever fit.
Except, of course, for those rueful, former Cinderellas who know better.
Many wives in long marriages, presuming Ms. Wall Spitzer was blown sideways by the news, were unnerved by the possibility that the person one has known since forever — that familiar, safe, pre-caffeinated face — could, in fact, be Dorian Gray.
“Your husband’s sleeping, and you look across the bed and think, ‘Do I really know this person?’ ” said Regina Brab, a human resources consultant from Montclair, N.J., who has been married for 17 years. “But I’m 100 percent sure my husband has never been to a prostitute. An affair? One hundred percent sure? No. But I sincerely doubt it. I know I haven’t had one — although my memory isn’t what it used to be.”
That was the refrain: not my husband. Not my husband. Although most women interviewed for this article had a friend or a relative or knew someone who ...
“I’ve heard thousands of stories from women who got blindsided by a version of this,” said Leslie Bennetts, author of “The Feminine Mistake,” an analysis of the roles of working women and mothers. Husbands who were gay, had second families, or patronized prostitutes.
And while many women thought Ms. Wall Spitzer must have had an inkling, Ms. Bennetts didn’t think that was necessarily so.
” There is a tremendous tendency toward denial,” she said. “The ones who permit themselves to think about that nagging doubt are far less common than the ones who reassure themselves ‘this could never happen to me,’ often when the very same thing is happening to ‘me.’ ”
In holding the Spitzer marriage crisis at arms’ length, many women seemed perplexed by her decision to stand by him. The very public nature of the disgrace roiled them as much as the details of it.
William D. Zabel, a Manhattan matrimonial lawyer, said the public or private nature of a transgression can be a deciding factor in whether a venerable marriage will survive.
“Most women who have a marriage of length with children and even grandchildren have at one time or another tried to get past a private transgression,” said Mr. Zabel, who has worked on the divorces of Howard Stern and George Soros.
But a woman robbed of her dignity in front of her community may be less willing to forgive, he said, adding, “Why don’t these political figures ever say to their wives, ‘I can take the blame but you don’t have to stand by me and be publicly humiliated’?”
Many women have focused on Ms. Wall Spitzer’s dilemma as mother.
“What message does she send her daughters if she stays with him?” said Wendy Belzberg, a former television producer and Manhattan mother of three, who has been married for 18 years.
“Does that mean the girls should grow up to be treated that way, and they should turn a blind eye?” she said. “It’s complicated. What she does as well as what he did will affect their daughters’ future relationships, as well as their respect for their father and their mother.”
But even as so many women spoke of the Spitzer debacle as if such things happen only to colonists at the far end of the galaxy, a quieter cohort watched Ms. Wall Spitzer and shuddered in recognition. One such woman, who requested anonymity to protect her children’s identity, had been married for over a decade to a Wall Street executive when she learned he had been using an escort service. She was shattered by the betrayal, by this new stranger.
“To go to an escort service, there is misogyny and a lack of respect for women,” she recounted. “Not to mention the diseases he could have brought home.”
She remained in the marriage for another year by reasoning that at least her husband hadn’t fallen in love with another woman. “I thought, ‘Well, he’s just got issues.’ I was so busy trying to understand him.”
He loved her, he said, and wanted the marriage to work. She hesitated to leave because she did not want to be seen as a home wrecker.
But she came to see in him an angry, toxic arrogance. “He believed he could do whatever he wanted and not get caught,” she said. “Once you feed that dark side, the monster grows. “There was a Madonna-whore thing going on,” she continued. “He had the perfect wife, the perfect children, the perfect job. But there was still self-loathing.”
She ended the marriage decisively some years ago, when her children were very young. They do not know this darker version of why the marriage collapsed.
But this week’s events brought a resurgence of her old pain. She has been weeping a lot for Ms. Wall Spitzer and her daughters, for herself and her children, for what was and what was not.
“My daughter came home from school after the Spitzer story broke,” the woman added, “and she said: ‘Mom, can you believe this? I feel so sorry for his daughters.’ And I’m thinking, ‘You should only know.’”