Sex Americana

Infidelity is no longer a career-killer for politicians. But weirdness, mendacity and ineptitude just might be.

By GERARD BAKER
WSJ

Familiar as it was in its essential plot, the agony of Mark Sanford this week was curiously singular in its theatrical detail.

Sex has upended so many political careers in the last few years that we have become dully inured to the tableau of staged contrition by which the fault is confessed to the world. Whether the backdrop is Washington or Trenton, Boise or Albany, the script is always the same.

But in Columbia, S.C., last Wednesday, a week of surreal small-state misadventure was fittingly capped with a press conference that might have been scripted by David Lynch, with its mysterious, murmuring stream-of-consciousness observations about life and love.

(More here.)