AS NEWS of John Edwards' tawdry affair broke last week, a panting e-mail tried to put a partisan spin to the scandal and introduce an old right-wing canard: Blame the media.

"What kind of man would cheat on his wife when she had cancer?" he demanded to know. "What real man would spend $400.00 dollars on a haircut and at the same time try to associate his self-effacement (I'm one of you) to his mill worker father?"

"The truth of it is the D's are not one damn bit better than the R's. There are just more free-loading and pandering journalists of the 'D' persuasion."

He's right on the first point, wrong on the second. The national media still love John McCain.

Exhibit A: Why so little discussion of the fact that Old Straight Talk divorced his first wife, a woman partially disabled in a car crash, to marry the daughter of a powerful Arizona beer distributor?

Edwards behaved like a self-absorbed heel, but Newt Gingrich carried divorce papers to the hospital room where Mrs. Newt No. 1 was recovering from cancer surgery.

We can recall, just two years ago, the saga of Rep. Mark Foley, R-Fla., chairman of the House Caucus on Missing and Exploited Children.

It turns out that Foley had, for 10 years, sent sexually suggestive e-mails and instant messages to teenage boys who had served as House pages.

Sexual misconduct and hypocrisy know no partisan affiliation. And, quite often, the press is a latecomer to the bedroom.

The two great fixers of Oregon politics, GOP Sen. Bob Packwood and Democratic Gov. Neil Goldschmidt, demonstrated sexual hubris for years before being brought low.

Packwood was notorious for sexual advances, but it was The Washington Post that exposed him.

A liberal Portland paper, Willamette Week, won a Pulitzer Prize for revealing that Goldschmidt had sexual relations, 30 years earlier, with his children's 14-year-old baby sitter while mayor of Portland.

Indiscretion produced a secret cease-fire that held in a presidential race. Democrats did not reveal that 1940 GOP nominee Wendell Willkie was carrying on an affair, while Republicans curbed personal innuendo about Franklin Roosevelt.

A surprisingly small number of politicians have suffered political ruin for bedroom antics or for being on the take.

"Since the first Congress, just under 12,000 individuals have served in the U.S. House and Senate, but far less than 1 percent of those have been expelled, indicted or tried for criminal activity," according to Kim Long, author of "The Almanac of Political Corruption, Scandals and Dirty Politics."

A big unanswered question, nationally and here in the Northwest: Why do powerful politicians come to act so stupidly?

It was asked when Sen. Larry Craig, R-Idaho, propositioned an undercover cop in an adjoining restroom stall at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport.

Senior aides asked that question when Sen. Brock Adams, D-Wash., tried to hit on his campaign scheduler, and when the daughter of longtime supporters was apparently drugged and woke up in bed with the senator.

They gave a partial answer by serving as his enablers.

Author Richard Reeves was once in town hawking a very good book on John F. Kennedy. Reeves had talked at the White House with Bill Clinton, who had read "President Kennedy: Profile of Power" from cover to cover.

One exercise of power had fascinated the 42nd president: How had Kennedy gotten away with a steady string of sexual liaisons while supposedly under constant scrutiny?

Clinton was caught, but those who cast stones at him were revealed to be living in houses of glass.

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Henry Hyde, at the age of 43, had a "youthful indiscretion" with a married mother of three. House Speaker Gingrich was in the midst of a six-year affair with a House aide who would become Mrs. Newt No. 3.

One final question: Why do Americans get so caught up when public figures are discovered with their pants down?

The French would yawn. The Germans have a chancellor who's been divorced and who lived for years in an unmarried relationship.

When Pierre Trudeau's funeral Mass was said at Montreal's Notre Dame Basilica, the former prime minister's ex-wife and her sons shared a pew with the daughter he sired out of wedlock, and her mother.

Americans love hypocrisy, particularly the "family values" politicians who get caught in restrooms or whorehouses. We've even made it blood sport: A tight-lipped spouse - e.g., the wives of Craig and Sen. David Vitter, R-La. - literally stands by her man.

Often, the cool common sense of a betrayed spouse - e.g., Elizabeth Edwards and Hillary Clinton - has controlled damage and allowed a randy mate to survive and carry

on.

In our state, a leftish Web site recently broke the story of an incident in which state Lands Commissioner Doug Sutherland showed undue affection toward a newly hired aide.

The groping is likely to have more effect at the polls than landslides, debris-choked streams and loose regulation of logging by the state Department of Natural Resources.

That's how the chips fly.