New York Congressman Anthony Weiner will resign, he just doesn’t know it yet.
He will be hassled by reporters, heckled by the public, shunned by friends, denounced by enemies and ridiculed by comedians until he does.
At some point he will realize that his effectiveness as a member of Congress has come to an end. The scandal will consume everything.
It will not matter how many times he makes pro forma apologies, accepts responsibility, seeks seclusion or goes into treatment.
Weiner must eventually accept what others before him have learned — the standard for holding office isn’t high, but there is a standard.
The public is forgiving, but not of people who cheat on their spouses, send pornographic images to young women and then tell brazen lies to cover it up.
Politicians seem remarkably incapable of learning these lessons by observation. Surely, Weiner had noted the tortured histories of John Edwards, David Vitter, Eliot Spitzer, John Ensign, Mark Foley and Larry Craig — all within recent years.
His scandal is little different and similarly unsurvivable.
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