What compelled the otherwise talented Weiner to go on sinning? Shortly before Breitbart's tragic death from a heart attack, I had lunch with Weiner's nemesis and he spun me an interesting theory. The Congressman was close friends with actor Ben Affleck, and they had a habit of burnishing each other's egos: Affleck told Weiner he would make a great mayor and Weiner encouraged Affleck to run for office.
Breitbart thought that Weiner came to see himself as a star rather than a politician, and had adopted Hollywood's nastier habits of vanity and sexual incontinence.
It's a neat idea, but it doesn't explain the antics of politicians who don't live in the shadow of Hollywood. In Britain, plenty of less well-connected men have engaged in risky sexual adventures that imperilled otherwise promising careers. Recall Ron Davies, Tony Blair's first Secretary of State for Wales, who resigned after a mysterious "moment of madness" on Clapham Common. Or the formerly uninteresting Lib Dem MP Mark Oaten, who quit his job when a newspaper alleged he had engaged in a menage a trois with rent boys. Neither man had spent much time in Tinseltown.
Perhaps the real answer is that a certain kind of personality is drawn to politics: a business that rewards machismo and risk-taking. Politicians need to force their personalities on others, and that quality is reinforced by sycophantic supporters.
So it's not surprising that office-holders come to believe that they are special, that the rules don't apply to them and that they can get away with almost anything.
But politics can also breed fragility. There's the politician's need to be loved, to have their likeability affirmed by others. They lead strange lives, separated for long periods from their families, in which they exist more as a public figure than as a private person. The search for risky sex can be about reclaiming a private world, creating a space within which they can either be who they really are or else live out some fantasy that can't be articulated publicly - they can become "Carlos Danger".
Weiner's choice of the name "Danger" probably says more than he intended. Some politicians simply get off on the risk involved in extra-marital shenanigans; others are inviting exposure, an excuse to end a career that is driving them mad.
Scandal can be motivated by a very human desire to escape. Speaking of his own moments of madness, Mark Oaten described his visits to the rent boys thus: "When I was there I did not feel guilt or panic, and the guy made me feel as though this was the most normal thing in the world."
When your life is as abnormal as a politician's, a quiet afternoon spent with a person paid to fake love and understanding is a visit to planet normal. Continental voters are far more sympathetic towards this desire to conduct two separate lives; few blushed when the mistress of the former French President Francois Mitterrand showed up at his funeral.
In the case of Weiner, there is evidence of both an addictive personality and enormous arrogance. But there is also vulnerability. In one message to his "fantasy" woman, he asked her how he looked and added: "I am deeply flawed." As are we all. Sometimes, when we see stressed men under extraordinary pressure doing daft things, we might remember: "There but for the grace of God go I."
