“The speaker who pilloried President Bill Clinton for his affair with Monica Lewinsky was himself having an affair at the time.”

That was one of our favorite lines from the AP’s story about Newt Gingrich’s second ex-wife Marianne telling the world via ABC News that Newt proposed they have an open marriage so that he could carry on the affair he’d already started with his current third wife, as reported in the LA Times.

This is the Newt who recently defined marriage as “between a man and a woman,” when he clearly meant “between a man and a woman, and then another woman, and then another woman,” or maybe with one on the side to hear his ex-wife tell it. He denies her allegations. Who seems more believable? See first line of story.

The LA Times also reported that during a presidential debate last night that Newt attacked “ABC for pursing the story and CNN moderator John King for asking about it,” evidently forgetting that what news people do is ask questions and that it comes with the territory.

We have no problem with open-relationships. We get that they’re not for everyone. What gets to us about this story is that if everyone who went around posing as paragons of marital virtue while having affairs –or turning a blind eye to them– would just declare themselves polyamorous and tell the world they were in an open relationship what do you want to bet the next Census would look like it was taken at Plato’s Retreat?