FIRST, LET'S DISPENSE with formalities and come to quick agreement on the gathering scandal of Rep. Mark Foley, R-Fla., whose lascivious emails and instant messages to House pages have Washington in thrall. The Foley epistles are "abhorrent" (House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi), "repulsive" (Speaker Dennis Hastert), and "repugnant" (Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid). And like President Bush, we too are "shocked," "dismayed," "disgusted," and "disappointed" by Foley's behavior.

Now, having said that, let us put things in perspective. For as much fun as the Foley affair has been for the press--and for Democrats, who had feared an October Surprise of another sort just a few weeks short of the mid-term elections--it is really a garden-variety congressional sex scandal. It may yet prove fatal to the House Republican leadership, as well as to the GOP majority in the House; but there is no compelling evidence of cosmic significance, nor apparent conspiracy to thwart justice. It is simply another instance of a fundamental truth: In any random selection of 435 members of the House of Representatives, a handful are likely to be lowlifes and perverts.

There is, however, a paradox in all this. If we look backward in time--say, over the past three decades--to count up previous congressional sex scandals, and then compare the figures to three decades before that, we are likely to conclude that the moral climate on Capitol Hill has fallen on a swift, and relentlessly downward, course. But that would be misleading. Since the early days of the Republic,

The paradox is that, as the popular culture has become more tolerant of sexual license, the reaction to congressional misconduct has grown disproportionately shrill. We can certainly agree that Foley's emails to youthful House employees make for stunning reading, and that he should have been disciplined by his colleagues at the very least. But it is also true that there is no evidence Foley realized the scenarios he typed on his computer, or threatened any of his reluctant correspondents. And as the late Mayor Jimmy Walker of New York once said, in a different context: "No woman was ever ruined by a book."

Modern congressional sex scandals fall into two principal categories: Members making fools of themselves; and members using their exalted status to prey on subordinates or extract favors. The model for the former category is one of the first, and most memorable, modern instances of mortification: the Wilbur Mills/Fanne Foxe Affair. In October 1974, Rep. Wilbur Mills, D-Ark., chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee and a 1972 Democratic presidential candidate, was stopped in the middle of the night near the Jefferson Memorial in Washington. While Mills and the officer conversed, his passenger, an Argentine-born stripper called Fanne Foxe, bolted from Mills's car and inexplicably jumped into the waters of the nearby Tidal Basin.