Huma Ubedin is beautiful and clever. She's married to a handsome politician. She's the kind of woman other women envy. Or, rather, would envy, if the handsome politician wasn't now world-famous for his big, bulging crotch.
It's just over a month since a photo of an erect male member battling grey boxer shorts was posted on the Twitter account of New York Congressman Anthony Weiner.
When the 'news' -- if you can call it news -- exploded on to the Twittersphere, and then the blogosphere, and then into what another prominent American politician calls the "lamestream" media, Weiner seemed a bit confused. He couldn't, he said, after what sounded like hours of close inspection with giant computer screens and tape measures, say "with certitude" whether it was really him.
Well, that, it turned out, was a porkie pie. The said member, he eventually admitted, was his. So were the boxers. And so were the hands that posted the picture on Twitter to a young student he'd never met.
The story then took the usual course. Denial. Reluctant confession. Refusal to resign. Resignation. And then, the vital coda to every modern scandal: rehab.
Weiner signed himself into 'intensive' rehab. Perhaps, if you're American, you know what this means. Perhaps, at 'intensive' rehab, you wear fluffy bathrobes and get fish pedicures, as John Prescott tweeted that he did last week.
But I presume that you also have to sit around in groups and talk about your problem, which you're encouraged to call an 'addiction'. And learn that the road to recovery consists of 12 steps.
The first step, of the 12-step recovery programme, pioneered by Alcoholics Anonymous and now used by anyone who says they're addicted to anything, is based on the principle that the person who says they have the addiction is 'powerless'.
You wouldn't want anyone to fall at the first hurdle, or step, but it's really quite hard to see how they wouldn't.
Weiner is, it's now clear, pretty good at lying, or at least he's had plenty of practice. But could he really say that the fingers that placed a smartphone inches away from his groin and clicked the camera icon and then posted the photo on Twitter had nothing to do with him?
And that the fingers that typed sexually-explicit texts to five other women also had nothing to do with him? And the lips that told his wife -- and the world -- that he hadn't?
Is tweeting photographs of your groin a disease? Cheating on your wife? Or chatting up blondes? Or eating too much chocolate? Or drinking too much wine?
If these are diseases, how do you catch them? And, if these are diseases, how do you manage not to chat up the blonde, or drink the wine, or tweet the penis, when, for example, you're due to give a speech in Congress, or in court?
I have no doubt that many people who drink too much, and eat too much, and cheat too much, have been helped by sitting around in rooms with other people telling each other that they're powerless. It's always nice to be with people who see the world in the same way as you.
But a habit is all it is. And a habit is just a habit -- something you choose to do a lot and can also choose to stop.
The other day, an Army friend of mine went into his six-year- old's class. The girls asked him about his uniform. The boys asked him about his guns. But some of them looked confused. In the end, a boy stuck up his hand. "What," he said, "is discipline?" He, we and Weiner may well ask.
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