There was a quite tough “I accuse” column yesterday by Maureen Dowd on the hypocrisy of Republicans who talk of morals and then prove to be captives of their all-too-real appetites. Fair enough. Some of her examples do juxtapose sermonizing with womanizing, and score points. But . . . wait: Who will police the police?

This moralist, I think, is the same journalistic scold who only recently in another hit piece clearly plagiarized a paragraph from another writer and then when caught (remember, the cover-up is always worse than the crime) in weird Mark Sanford-like rambling fashion pleaded that she had only inadvertently stolen it from an unidentified correspondent, who in turn had first lifted it from someone else (e.g., “I was talking to a friend of mine Friday about what I was writing who suggested I make this point, expressing it in a cogent — and I assumed spontaneous — way and I wanted to weave the idea into my column”). Sort of like the purchaser of a fenced TV pleading that she’s innocent since she didn’t steal the set herself. If the hypocritical sin of the pious politician is adultery, then surely its moral counterpart for the journalist is intellectual theft followed by a refusal to ‘fess up when caught.