Two days ago, Andrew Young, a former aide to John Edwards, turned over the now notorious sex tape featuring Edwards and his mistress to a North Caroline judge. Young, who recently released a tell all account of the Edwards presidential campaign and the scandal that destroyed it, is one of the many supporters whose careers, political loyalties, and deepest affections Edwards has squandered with his lies and infidelities. Edwards' career now lies in ruins as his reputation is further demolished by everything from the heartbreaking, his repeated denials of his daughter's paternity, to the absurd, Young's claim that the former North Carolina senator asked him to steal the baby's diaper to conduct a secret paternity test.

With Valentine's Day around the corner, the Edwards' broken marriage seems especially heart breaking, but not at all unusual. This was a year rocked by highly publicized political infidelity. Last summer, South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford subjected his state and the rest of the nation to a ridiculous week of speculation when the governor simply disappeared. After his flimsy excuse of hiking the Appalachian Trail collapsed when he was spotted getting off a flight from South America, Sanford finally admitted to an extramarital affair with an Argentinean woman and indiscretions with a several other women over the years. After the governor publicly broke into tears over the woman he referred to as his "soul mate", Sanford's wife moved out of the South Carolina governor's mansion with their four sons and eventually filed for divorce.

Around the same time as the Sanford scandal, Nevada Senator John Ensign admitted to an affair with Cynthia Hampton, the wife of one of Ensign's top aides, Douglas Hampton. When Douglas Hampton addressed the situation with Ensign, the senator arranged for Hampton to join a political consulting firm in Nevada with several campaign donors as clients. It was later discovered that Ensign's parents gave the Hamptons $96,000 that spring which they claim was a gift, but the Hamptons have publicly considered a severance offer. Last month Politico reported that the FBI is now investigating possible criminal violations connected to the scandal.

The pain and disappointment caused by these recent affairs contrasts sharply with the romanticized rumors of President Kennedy‘s torrid affair with Marilyn Monroe and other scandals of the past. In the intervening decades, the press has shed the code of silence it once showed toward the marital indiscretions of America's elected leaders. The expansion of the news media onto the internet and cable television has enabled anyone with a cell phone in an airport to break a politician's affair wide open. Some skeptics may think this recent slew of affairs is indicative of some kind of declining morality in this country, but it's naïve to think that politicians and people in general were more honest and disciplined when the news was confined to the three big television networks and local papers. If anything, we should recognize these debacles for the ways they increase accountability of our leaders. While it's regrettable that their families' private affairs are still splashed across the internet months later, it's hard to renounce more transparent government.