Refresh our memory here: Why was it that former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer had to be run out of office on a wave of moralistic na-na-na-na-na-naaas -- leaving the state to descend into political chaos?

Is New York better off now than with Mr. Spitzer and his twisted marital relationship and high-priced call girls? Better with someone who had to learn to deal with the limelight as he went along while Rome -- er, New York, burned?

Meanwhile, the polls in Italy show that Prime Minister Berlusconi's popularity rating is just about where it was before his latest complex -- if that's the word -- relationship hit the news.

And, of course, there is France, where the president is married to a supermodel who has posed nude, and it is considered a topic for speculation only when either the wife or the mistress of a deceased French leader fail to show for his funeral. Both is normal.

Americans have sometimes paid an awesome price for our puritan mentality (as in the hounding of Bill Clinton by politically motivated moralists, which led to the defeat of Al Gore, who somehow was linked to Monica Lewinsky, and the election of George W. Bush), but New York seems to be setting a modern record.

We think there must be more than a few New Yorkers out there thinking, "Eliot, my man ... kidding -- we were kidding!"

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