US 'Family Values' Senator taken down by DC Madam

I just love stories like this. Can't get enough of them. The people who bleat loudest about 'traditional values' are always the ones with the kinkily-positioned skeletons in their closet. Last year we were treated to the spectacle of Ted Haggard and his denials about snorting meth and taking it up the arse from a muscled male escort, and today we are privileged to enjoy the drama of the 'serious sin' in the past (yeah right, just the past) of Louisiana 'family values' Senator David Vitter:

LEANS, July 10 — From the beginning of his political career 16 years ago, Senator David Vitter has been known for efforts to plant himself on the moral high ground, challenging the ethics of other Louisiana politicians, decrying same-sex marriage and depicting himself as a clean-as-a-whistle champion of family values.

“I’m a conservative who opposes radically redefining marriage, the most important social institution in human history,” Mr. Vitter, a 46-year-old Republican, wrote in a letter last year to The Times-Picayune, the New Orleans daily.

Yeah. That 'most important social insitution' of a man, a woman, and a couple of hookers on the side when no-one is looking. More of the good stuff:

That self-created image, a political winner here since 1991, when Mr. Vitter joined the Louisiana House, took a tumble Monday with the disclosure that his phone number was among those on a list of client numbers kept by Deborah Jeane Palfrey, the so-called D.C. Madam, who is accused of running a prostitution ring in Washington.

Mr. Vitter admitted Monday night to a “very serious sin in my past,” and talk radio and coffee shops here buzzed all day Tuesday with the front-page news, even as the senator remained out of sight.

[...]

Mr. Vitter, an uncompromising foe of abortion, same-sex marriage and the immigration compromise that died in the Senate in June, was supposed to be [presidential contender] Giuliani’s ambassador to a region with large numbers of social conservatives suspicious of the candidate’s moderate views. His viability in that role is now in doubt with his acknowledgment that his number was already in the phone records of Pamela Martin & Associates before he ran for the Senate in 2004.

[...]

State Department official, Randall L. Tobias, resigned in April with the disclosure that he had been a client.

[...]

But Mr. Vitter is the first member of Congress to admit an association. Hustler magazine said Tuesday that it had uncovered that link and that the senator’s public admission had resulted from its subsequent call to his office.

In New Orleans, meanwhile, the madam of a high-priced brothel that was shut down by federal authorities in 2002 told a local television station, WDSU, that Mr. Vitter was one of her clients in the 1990s. The woman, Jeanette Maier, called him “one of the nicest and most honorable men I’ve ever met.” Mr. Vitter’s office did not immediately return a call for comment Tuesday night.

[...]

Five years ago Mr. Vitter was linked by a New Orleans weekly to a prostitute in the French Quarter, an association he angrily denied. But by then his position as a self-proclaimed scourge of lax ethics was well established.