There but for the grace of God go I?

Someone today suggested we approach the Spitzer debacle from the perspective of "There but for the grace of God go I." In one sense, this is right -- surely we have all, at times, done things we are (or ought to be) ashamed of... and were just lucky enough not to be caught and publicly humiliated or punished.

But in another sense, the sentiment is entirely off-base. Surely it is not really God's grace that keeps millions of married men from structuring complicated financial transactions so that they can clandestinely spend vast sums of money to cheat on their wives. I think it might be something more like a basic sense of decency.

Maybe an "otherwise decent" guy might stray (a debatable point), but the facts would look very different -- an affair might start when he turns a blind eye to the signs that a friendship is transforming into something more, or he might hook up with someone under the influence of drugs or alcohol. It's a question of whether there is at least an element of fortuity to the misdeed, rather than cold calculation. A guy who deliberately plans how to funnel thousands of dollars to a brothel and books prostitution services in advance to coordinate with his out-of-state trips knows exactly what he is doing and can't even hide behind the fig leaf of being swept away by passion. Somewhere along the path that Spitzer reportedly tread, a man with the slightest shred of decency would bail out because he could not possibly justify these machinations to himself.