Note: Thanks to a reader for pointing out an incorrect reference to Edwin Edwards. That sentence has been removed.

We’ve seen it all oh so many times before — the powerful public man, stoical wife by his side, admitting ever so cryptically that he gave in to his gonads. This time — at a news conference yesterday — it was Eliot Spitzer, the governor of my state. The Guv was caught on a federal wiretap of his own cellphone making arrangements to meet a very high-priced (thousands of dollars per hour!) prostitute in a hotel room in Washington, D.C., last month.

The affidavit, identifying Spitzer only as “Client 9,” revealed that he paid the doxy’s trainfare from New York, and left the hallway door to his suite ajar so she could bypass the front desk. Spitzer, the affidavit said, had used the same service — “Emperor’s Club V.I.P.” — before, and ran a kind of tab. At the press conference, Spitzer said, “I have acted in a way that violates my obligations to my family and violates my, or any, sense of right and wrong. … I apologize first and most importantly to my family. I apologize to the public to whom I promised better.”

Not being a lawyer, I don’t know whether or to what extent Spitzer is vulnerable on the criminal front (there have been hints of a prosecution for fraud in setting up accounts to pay the Emperor’s Club, or even considering the Federal Mann Act in the matter). But the political punditry on Spitzer’s actions is falling into four camps, from the exculpatory sigh (“T’was ever thus”) to moralist anger (“Men just can’t keep it in their pants”; “Another damned alpha male”), to thinly disguised glee (“How the mighty doth fall”) to incomprehension (“The guy must be mad”).

Me, I find myself thinking once again about nature’s devilishness in creating such a huge gap between the ways the two sexes play out their sexual desires. I mean, I can’t come up with a modern example of a woman political leader caught in a boy-toy scandal. (When I asked my husband, “Why could Spitzer not control his urges?,” he asked me in turn what planet I’d just parachuted down from. A businessman friend of ours, an ex-pat who lives in Moscow, likes to say, “Men want three things: money, nookie, and strange nookie.”)

On the one hand, I subscribe to a pragmatic liberal optimism which posits that while humans are unlikely to ever end up all singing Kumbaya together — where we share and share alike — we are slowly thinking our way toward becoming generally better. On the other hand, I suspect (along with like the likes of Thomas Hobbes and a few other political philosophers) that “human nature” is a rather homely constant.

Pace Fernand Braudel and Howard Zinn, my conservative side thinks history is largely writ by leaders, and that the good side of history is writ by politically virtuous leaders. The Spitzer case abruptly reminds me that I ought to chuck, once and for all, the idiotic idea that political virtue, even when it’s limited, extends in any way whatsoever to sexual virtue.

FDR had his Lucy, Eisenhower had his Kay, JFK had, well, who can list them all? Spitzer’s story is, I guess, just a particularly tawdry form of an old, old story. At least those other luminaries didn’t have to go running around to ATM’s to scour up the cash to pay the pimp.