Mom Interrupted: Don't politicians compare notes?

It has not been, as they say in the trade, a slow news week. Unrest in Iran, Farrah Fawcett passed away, and with his own untimely demise, Michael Jackson earned Mark Sanford's eternal gratitude for pushing the South Carolina governor and his upcoming film with John Ensign (Dumb and Dumber, Part II) out of the news.

We'll say nothing but good of the dead, but for the politically deceased, nothing gives as much fun as picking apart yet another family-value politician from either side of the fence who has given new and tawdry meaning to the phrase "hiking the Appalachian Trail."

While we wait for the Clue Wagon to circle around for Mr. Sanford, we'll take a moment to remind everyone that e-mailed love letters do not disappear after you hit the "delete" key. They linger in other people's in boxes and get forwarded to the American press by jilted, hot-blooded Argentinean lovers, who are not amused at getting ditched for boring family-values governors. Wiser, sadder passengers of the Clue Wagon know that writing those letters was exhilarating and made you feel like you were 15 again, but when they are inevitably leaked to the press your use of phrases like "magnificent gentle kisses" is going to make you LOOK like a 15 year old. Which is not as appealing as you might think on a 49-year-old man.

Is Sanford old enough to remember Wilbur Mills, who first distinguished himself as chair of the House Ways and Means Committee and as a presidential hopeful, but then politically drowned himself in Washington's Tidal Basin by getting caught having an affair with a stripper, with the now-retroactively-hysterical billing as the Argentine Firecracker?

But it was only just last year when Eliot Spitzer resigned from his law-and-order governor's perch for being the most famous john ever of a high-priced New York call girl ring. Don't politicians read the news? Talk to each other? Compare notes in the buffet line at the Governor's Convention? "Wow. Jim McGreevey said it was just a nightmare settling that gay sexual harassment suit. Go figure."

But even as he lingered in the Southern Hemisphere, Sanford thoughtfully sent me a letter so I would want him, too. I ripped into it, hoping that he would toss me a bone and praise the "curve of my hips," or maybe, just maybe, say one word about how beautiful I look in the "faded glow of night's light." Because I do, and I would vote for anyone who noticed. Definitely.

Alas, he only spoke of fiscal responsibility, and even then, didn't once mention how to use your state expense account to fund trips to Argentina so you can do the horizontal mambo with your girlfriend. And he calls himself a sound businessman.

I don't know about you, but I've given up hoping that a politician would actually do something crazy like, not commit the sin he is specifically, publicly and loudly condemning. Now I'm just hoping that, when the next one inevitably gets caught with his metaphorical (and sometimes literal) pants around his ankles, it's for something original, like the Israeli ambassador to El Salvador, who, in February 2007, was found naked, drunk and tied up with sex toys outside the embassy.

But nowhere near the Appalachian Trail.

Ó.

Ahwatukee Foothills resident Elizabeth Evans can be reached at elizabethann40@hotmail.com. Her column appears monthly.