The “roundtable” on George Stephanopoulos’ “This week” spent a lot of time on Mark Sanford.
The comments we feel most compelled to make regarding this tend to be to share our calculus of moral judgment. One of the interesting takes (as taken in the Salon piece ) was that Sanford gets “higher marks” or is better understood than, let’s say Elliot Spitzer for having “fallen in love” rather than contracting a sex worker. I doubt his wife draws any comfort from the distinction. The cultural cues, however, are consistent. Infidelity motivated by romance is somehow more noble or less base than infidelity motivated by sheer lust. What is the difference really? The calculus reveals at least as much about the one doing the math as the one upon which the math is done. This is why we do it.
The high horse the left rides in on is the charge of hypocrisy given Sanford’s performance during the Clinton affair. One might want to be aware that the impact of the fall is directly related to the height of one’s horse. The enjoyment of comupances is sometimes something best done quietly and alone.
Peggy Noonan on the Roundtable claims that during the Clinton era “a new devilishness was unleashed especially in the media where a new meanness took style… We are reacting in the nation and especially in the media as kind of Puritans without faith, and that is the worst of both possible worlds to be puritanical without faith.”
One of the comforts of Calvinism is that one of your signature doctrines, total depravity, is regularly demonstrated individually and communally. Men and women stumble and fall predictably yet often surprisingly. Kathleen Parker notes that this kind of stumble on the part of Mark Sanford shocked her, although later she talks about his weirdness. Apparently her image of Sanford included weirdness but not romance.
Part of what is on trial here are the images we carry around of our adversaries in our minds and use to interpret them to the world. Some scripts say we expect Republican moralists to fall like Larry Craig but here this one is caught with passionate e-mails that causes those who believe in romance to cut him a bit of slack, the kind we certainly wouldn’t allow John Edwards or Elliot Spitzer.
When we autopsy the carcasses our own fallenness we note the complexity and mystery of our bad choices. We see the maelstrom of hurts, needs and longings, legitimate or otherwise. We inhabit the strange chair of first person observers where we are detached from our own actions as if they were not fully our own. When the outside world impinges itself we discover that it was indeed me who caused this pain and my fingerprints are all over the fallen house around me.
The buzz created by the sex lives of our political leaders is less a function of their professional performance and more a function of our celebrity-fascinated culture that wishes to either identify with heroes or tear down the villains. We are both fascinated and repulsed by the carnage on the side of the political highway and the traffic slows down just enough for each of us to get a good look or process whatever it is we do in our heads as we intentionally divert our eyes.
These wrecks also provide moments by which we publically attempt to exercise theological systems of anthropology out of the hope of understanding ourselves. pvk
Leadingchurch.com 
For what it’s worth, in his book “Re-bonding: Preventing and Restoring Damaged Relationships,” Donald Joy highlights the difference in scripture between the words traditionally translated “fornication” (PORNEA) and “adultery” (AKATHARSIA). Those guilty of PORNEA have divorced sexuality from intimacy and human relationship, turning sex into a transaction. Those guilty of AKATHARSIA, on the other hand, have polluted the singular bond that God intended by bonding to a second person (as the word “adultery” shares an etymological connection with the word “adulterate”) . Not, as you say, that this is much comfort to Mrs. Sanford.
You’re quite right. We can do one, the other, or both. Neither are they exclusive.
In the Old Testament “adultery” seemed to be mostly an offense against a man’s honor and property. David didn’t commit “adultery” when he wedded or bedded all of his wives or concubines, he did so when he bedded Uriah’s wife. No one who didn’t know about the back story said anything when David took Bathsheba as his wife. It might have even been a respectable thing to do, to care for the wife of your faithful servant.
Jesus and Paul, for all the bad press they get sometimes regarding marriage and women turn the situation into a far more reciprocal relationship.
What is amazing in our culture is how utilitarian it has all become in terms of our cultural “summon bonum” of individual self-fulfillment. Mark Sanford is guilty of violating his wife’s quest for self-fulfillment by hurting her, but if it were not for the obvious flesh and blood victim of the affair (the wife) the culture would call “no harm, no foul”. The sense of a violation of shalom is not found in the way it is in Psalm 51 “against you, and you only have I sinned”. When the throne of heaven is empty, all conflicts and relationships are merely useful or frustrating.
Thanks again for your comment Nate!