Greg Stumbo and Eliot Spitzer: Two peas in a pod

What do Greg Stumbo and Eliot Spitzer have in common?

(Besides being adulterers, of course)?

Both prosecuted behaviors that they themselves were personally involved in.

Spitzer, it's coming out, was using the services of prostitutes even while prosecuting them as attorney general of New York.

Stumbo, as attorney general, prosecuted the same behavior in which he was involved as a state representative.

Letters exist, written on Stumbo's 95th District legislative letterhead, in which the once and current General Assembly member made recommendations for state merit system jobs. If the political connection was not so important, those recommendations could have been written on "Greg Stumbo, Attorney At Law" stationery or on plain white paper instead of his official stationery. The political implication was clear through the use of his official elected position as a Democrat leader.

And yet among those prosecuted during Stumbo's attack on the Fletcher administration was attorney and private citizen J. Marshall Hughes, whose only "crime" was being a Republican activist who made some job recommendations to Fletcher's people. Hughes had no official position within the Fletcher administration and no authority to make hiring decisions, yet he found himself on the business end of one of Stumbo's indictments.

Stumbo remains a disgrace to this state. The fact that he seems on the verge of pulling a power play and taking control of the House of Representatives astonishes us. He deserves as much, if not more, scorn as Spitzer is getting for his conduct. At least it hasn't come out that Spitzer fathered a child with one of his hookers and then not only refused to pay child support but countersued for harassment once the mother went to court to collect the back child support.