Jackson got caught and made a statement. "I am truly sorry for my actions," he said. "I am father to a daughter who was born outside of my marriage."

The National Enquirer broke the news last week, running a picture of Jackson at the White House with then President Clinton and Jackson's then pregnant mistress. A damning picture in lurid color. A true story.

Good, though, to keep in mind how low on the news hog we're eating. This week's Enquirer stories include "Meg Ryan Dumped!" and "'Survivor 2' contestant to wed her son."

But that's a quibble. What worries me? We've developed a system guaranteed to keep the most brilliant people out of public life. And now we're perfecting it, tightening the net.

You don't agree? Just imagine running a 747 the way we run the nation. Moments before takeoff, we learn that the pilot -- a married man -- has been cheating on his wife. Do we really want to trust our precious bodies to a character so conspicuously flawed?

"That's what copilots are for," you say. What if the copilot, also married, is the man the pilot has been cheating with?

Now we are offended. Supposing in the airplane, as in the nation, we have to solve our crisis with the people already aboard. No smokers need apply. Many pilots have been in the military. We wouldn't want a man who'd dropped bombs on civilians. Well, by the time we got down off of our high horse, we'd have the cutest 9-year-old girl up there at the controls. Dang if she wouldn't be thinking happy thoughts, too, as she drove the plane into the terminal and killed us all in our seats.

What we want in a pilot is the ability to fly an airplane. What we want in a leader is the ability to lead.

And wouldn't it be a fine thing if talent and character were predictably linked? They're not. Since biographies are rarely written about ordinary men and women, there's no control group, and it may be that your average freelance writer or postal clerk is just as wretched and contradictory a creature as Ulysses S. Grant, or Lord Nelson, John Lennon or John Fitzgerald Kennedy. I don't know. What I do know is this: You rarely find an extraordinary man or woman who is also exemplary.

Then why are we always surprised? We don't know much about history. There's that. But also the vast engine for getting dirt on our betters is faster and technically better than it was in the past.

Envy is the driving force of our time. H.L. Mencken defined puritanism as "the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy." For a country whose music lyrics would have been banned in Sodom and Gomorrah, we have Puritans thick on the ground.

Jackson is 59 and his mistress, Karin Stanford, is 39. I suppose that makes it sound too much like fun for the American voter. The New York Post described Stanford as a "brainy activist." She wrote a book about him. She titled it "Beyond the Boundaries: Reverend Jesse Jackson and International Affairs." How many of us ever get a brainy activist in bed? Add the book, and I'm sore. It's rare enough to get a card, but a whole book -- 236 pages. About me.

No wonder I'm furious at the Rev. Jackson.

But how much bearing does this have on Jackson's public role? I wonder. He's a civil rights leader. That's what he's supposed to do, and that's what he does. He heads the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition, "a nonprofit organization that seeks economic and political power for minorities." Or that's what the New York Times calls it.

Nothing about adultery in the title.

Private Life Romance, relationships, and the personal side of Table Talk