Everyone remembers the Greek concept of Nemesis (“the giver of what’s due”), and the chain of events that invites her to intervene: a fatal character flaw that leads to hubris that in turn incurs divine retribution, culminating in personal ruin.

Bill Clinton this campaign season seems a character right out of Sophocles, an Oedipus that just can’t stop himself. He knows the end, but simply cannot desist, no more than he could lecture Monica about the inappropriateness of a subordinate young female employee satisfying the lusts of her male senior superior boss.

His natural talents were more than offset by extraordinary character flaws, as we remember — a tendency to exaggerate, if not often fabricate entirely. His temper was legendary, especially when called on his bending of the truth or becoming self-absorbed to the point of embarrassment. He never controlled his own appetites, whether that meant sexual, culinary, or thirst for the spotlight. All that explains his implosion with Monica, the pardons, and the tawdry exit from office.

But if the flaws were still there, he at least attempted a Nixonian (an apt analogy given his similar end) rehabilitation by globe-trotting, and playing the humanitarian-now the bipartisan senior statesman, now the Democratic Wise Man kindly offering his consultation to less experienced novices. As in all his prior escapes from personal ruin, the comeback kid found that he could always talk, threaten, cajole, or unleash his surrogates to do enough triangulation, revisionism, or charm to land on his feet. That sums up not only his brushes with personal scandal but the incredible rehabilitation post 2001.

And now? Hillary’s campaign is just heating up, and Bill has, almost by divine will, thrown away not only his emeritus reinvention, but appreciation of his accomplishments of the 1980s and 1990s, themselves unknown to a new generation of American who will remember only his performance the last two months (and it isn’t over yet).

Nemesis left her perch at Rhamnous, and must have flown over here to sit on his shoulder, waiting, waiting for just the right moment to unleash his legendary flaws to ensure an apt ruin.

When it became a question of Bill getting back in the White House for another eight years — more adulation, more attention, more opportunities for indulgence — then all came back to the fore, in ways we have not quite witnessed before.

He has fabricated almost everything from his own history about unyielding opposition to the war to why he magnanimously did not run in 1988. In temper tantrum after temper tantrum, he has told off interviewers, blown up at reporters, and hectored audiences. In the most embarrassing moments on stage, he has held on to the microphone with an iron-clad grip, and one cannot listen to him without hearing the same mantra of how he suffered at the hands of all our enemies and all for us.

The result is more than embarrassing to watch. Our first black President has unleashed a vicious campaign against our first serious black Presidential candidate — and all for the crime of standing in the way of his return for more. In a manner beyond the powers of the most right-wing polemicist, Bill has exposed liberal pieties and condescensions, or the idea that a supposedly black inspirational upstart has no business freelancing without sanction from senior liberals who have paid their dues and alone have the political savvy and experience to help black folks.

Nemesis has reminded us as well of the creed of Clintonian feminism.

Our first female President is here only because of her husband, and he here only because his long-suffering wife is the only ticket left back to the White House, which is an apparent addiction that he can’t kick. Even if Hillary wins there will be an asterisk, since the campaign has taught us that we have no idea of whether we are voting for Hillary, Bill, or both. This second Clintonian tutorial about feminism overshadows even his earlier exploitative sexual conquests, and suggests he (and she) view gender relations as mercenary and contractual, where each plays on stereotypes, and uses the other’s gender advantages for personal aggrandizement (tough guy Bill rides to the rescue to smear meanie male rivals, loving wife loyally forgives sins and stands by her man as a paragon of marriage partnership and loyalty, albeit shedding a tear now and then for her suffering).

And Nemesis has only begun her work.