Laura Clawson of Daily Kos delves into why, by Republican standards, it’s fine for Sen. Vitter to keep his committee appointments after fetish-y sex with prostitutes even though Sen. Ensign felt obliged to resign from his assignments after an vanilla love affair with a campaign staffer.

The most obvious interpretation is therefore that what Ensign did was worse (though Vitter’s was still a very serious sin!). But a Louisiana pollster quoted in Roll Call has another theory:

“I don’t think this will help or hurt Vitter,” Pinsonat said. “If anything, it leans towards helping him because … the more this stuff happens the more it becomes ho-hum. You can’t say it’s just David Vitter. ... It happens so often, I don’t think it’s as stunning an event as it was 15 years ago.”

So two lessons to keep in mind when planning your adultery: Better a professional than an employee, and if you’re lucky enough to be a Republican lawmaker, thanks to the efforts of Vitter, Larry Craig, Newt Gingrich, John Ensign, and so many others, you are now good to go.

She said it here.

To be honest that’s probably, approximately, right. Neither Ensign nor Vitter should resign anything because their sex lives don’t match conventional demands. Although they probably ought to resign for continuing to advocate legislation and policy that contradicts their direct knowledge and experience.

If you set aside snark, priggishness, twittery, and sarcasm the issue isn’t moral hypocrisy, it’s a question of — as I first said in the case Bush-era “AIDS czar” Randall Tobias — how they can continue to advocate public health, education, and legal programs intended to sometimes-harshly enforce abstinence, monogamy, and, say, heteronormativity when their personal experience makes it clear that those policies aren’t, and perhaps can’t be effective.

There’s an integrity problem here, but it’s not about who wets his whistle where.