Eliot Spitzer, who resigned as governor of New York for patronizing prostitutes, will soon be seen on CNN weekday nights pontificating alongside a Foxy conservative co-anchor.

Meanwhile, the contest for his old job is making Spitzer look like a choirboy as the Republican candidate declares “off limits” any discussion of a daughter with another woman while married to the mother of his three children.

Carl Paladino’s emergence as a Tea Party hero who wants to “take a bat” to traditional politicians has caused a crisis of conscience for Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post, which loves angry GOP pols almost as much as sex scandals.

Now the would-be governor is threatening to “take out” a nosy Post editor, making it clear he is using the term in a Goodfellas sense rather than offering to share Chinese food with him. If the Post ends up endorsing Paladino, it could be a first in American journalism.

On the other coast, the gubernatorial issue is not who’s been sharing the candidate’s bed but who’s been making it. Meg Whitman is explaining away an illegal immigrant who was her housekeeper for nine years until the eBay tycoon decided to run for office.

Firing her for self-protection was apparently OK, but turning her in, Whitman now says, would not have been the “right thing” to do, offering a new gloss on compassionate Conservatism.

All this induces nostalgia for North Carolina’s outgoing governor, Mark Sanford, who had enough respect for voters to try to cover his tracks with that Appalachian Trail story as he sought true love in Argentina.

MORE.