Much as I hate to disagree with Bill, I’m closer to Andrew on this one. Yes, integrity is wholeness, but here we’re talking about the wholeness of human beings who, unlike vessels, are flawed by nature. It also seems absurd to me to suggest that affairs of the heart are not in any sense different from — or to be judged differently than – even a private person’s professional obligations, let alone an elected or appointed official’s public duties.

It’s certainly possible that someone who acts immorally in his personal life will be so pervasively immoral that it spills over into all facets of his life. But it’s not my experience — and I’ve crossed paths with a lot of people who’ve done a lot of very bad things — that making a bad judgment, or even several, necessarily means the person is bad across the board. It is sometimes true, but it is not the rule.

Most of us (I would say all of us, but I’m not that presumptuous) have made some blunderous mistakes in our lives. I know I have. The hope is that if we are decent people, if we have integrity, it is in part because we have taken these errors to heart and become better because of them.

Governor Sanford has done a bad thing and he’s going to pay dearly for it. But I’m not writing him off because of it. If we end up learning that it’s part of a pattern or that he systematically used the privileges of his office to obstruct legitimate inquiry into his conduct, that’s another story. But I doubt it’s going to happen. I think we’re going to end up with a reasonably good human being who made some bad mistakes and caused his family a lot of pain.

If the Colson standard is going to be the standard, two things — both bad — happen. First, good people are going to refrain from public life because they are not going to put their loved ones through the ringer the Colson standard invites (the standard that encourages the media and our ideological adversaries to scorch the earth since a single flaw is sure to derail the career of a talented conservative). Second, the people who will be most wounded by this state of things are conservatives: The Left does not impose the same standards and its most talented people needn’t fear being marginalized by their human flaws. We will be ensuring that they get their best team on the field and we don’t.