A study in hypocrisy

Every once in awhile, you run across a line you really wish you'd written. So it is with this lede by Maureen Dowd in her latest column:

As in all great affairs, Mark Sanford fell in love simultaneously with a woman and himself — with the dashing new version of himself he saw in her molten eyes.

That's almost poetry. I'm not one of Dowd's biggest fans -- sometimes she flogs her metaphors beyond endurance and comes off as simply sophomoric -- but her take on the two sides of South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford is brilliant. There's Mark, the penny-pinching prig; and there's Marco, the lying Latin lover. Her damning contrast between the two, between Sanford's conservative talk and libertine walk, should be required reading at the hypocrisy-prevention seminars the GOP must surely be planning by now.