America:It's the Summer of Love in Los Angeles, where rising Democratic Party star Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa admitted last month he has been having an extramarital affair with the same local television reporter who obtained the journalistic scoop that Villaraigosa was separating from his wife of 20 years. The mayor is lying low and she is on leave from her job.
In Washington DC it was not love that was alleged. It was the summer of sex for money again. Senator David Vitter, a Republican from Louisiana known for championing family values admitted he'd been a client of a local prostitution service. Beside him stood his loyal wife, Wendy, who famously criticised Hillary Clinton for not divorcing Bill Clinton in 2000.
"I'm a lot more like Lorena Bobbitt than Hillary," Mrs Vitter said back then, referring to the woman who cut off her husband's penis and threw it from the window of a moving car.
"If he does anything like that, I'm walking away with one thing and it's not alimony, trust me."
At last report, Senator Vitter was asking for forgiveness from God . . . and his wife.
In a Minneapolis airport bathroom stall, Senator Larry Craig, another Bible-thumping Republican from Idaho, had a severe episode of shaky leg syndrome. An undercover police officer, assigned to the bathroom after complaints that the place was becoming well known as a place for sexual encounters, arrested Senator Craig after he tapped his foot against the officer's "in a signal often used by persons communicating a desire to engage in sexual conduct". The officer alleged that Craig also put his hand beneath the divider into the adjacent stall.
Senator Craig denied he was soliciting sex, claiming that, in the bathroom, he has a "wide stance". Nonetheless, Craig pleaded guilty and managed to keep the June incident a secret from everyone, including his wife and family, until last week, when a reporter followed a tip.
"I am not gay," the senator said three times this week, also denying the misdemeanour charge to which he pleaded guilty. Beside him stood the de rigueur teary-eyed wife, Suzanne Craig. It turns out the Idaho Statesman, a respected newspaper, was investigating the senator, who despite his fierce opposition to gay rights has long been rumoured to have had various dalliances. This week the newspaper published an interview with a man who claimed, in some detail, that he had oral sex with the senator in a bathroom in Union Station in Washington in 2004.
Does any of this matter in the great scheme of things? Here's the list for the last two years. In February 2007, another Democratic rising star, San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom, in the midst of a divorce from his wife, admitted he was having an affair with a married woman, the wife of one of his best friends and top aides.
Last year Republican congressman Mark Foley of Florida, who helped write a major piece of sexual predator legislation, was revealed to have sent sexually explicit e-mails to a 16-year-old intern. He resigned in shame in September 2006.
In 2005 Jim West, mayor of Spokane, Washington, another fiercely anti-gay Republican, was discovered to have offered gifts and a City Hall internship to a man on a gay internet site who told West he was 17. Shortly after two men alleged that West had molested them when they were boy scouts 20 years earlier. West was ousted from office and died later that year of colon cancer.
The problem, arguably, is not infidelity but hypocrisy and a climate of unrealistic sexual conservatism. US Newsweek columnist Howard Fineman calls Washington the "Cave of the Sightless Fish. We hear everything, see nothing".
Meanwhile, there are huge political hurdles to climb: a war in Iraq; collapsing bridges; a mortgage and credit crisis; not to mention global warming.
The arresting officer in the Craig incident, listening to what he believed was the less than honest explanation of the politician, said: "No wonder we're going down the tubes."
A presidential election looms. It's time to end Electile Dysfunction in American politics.
Denis Staunton is on leave