Looks like the levee will hold, according to reports from Valley Park, Missouri. But the floods which have taken 16 lives in the Midwest continue to make this a wet and dangerous Easter for many. May those waters soon recede.

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On a lighter note, the term “it doesn’t rain but it pours” has some application to the, er, state of affairs in New York state politics. Eliot Spitzer recently resigned as New York governor after it emerged that the former crusading, straight-arrow attorney-general had been patronizing high-priced ladies of the evening for years. His lieutenant governor, David Paterson, has now been in office less than a week and is effectively being buried under the ever-expanding stories of his adulterous sexual liaisons and the suspicions that he may have used political cash to finance the dalliances. Both of these scandals have to be seen as also coming in the wake of the spectacularly sordid Gov. Jim McGreevey scandal across the river in New Jersey (in 2004, he resigned after admitting — or at least claiming — that he had had an affair with a male employee). That’s a scandal that continues to raise its head in the newspapers due to accusations and counter-accusations between the former governor and his wife. So, Jacob Gershman in the New York Sun says that New York’s new governor, Paterson, is now being seen as a charter member of this “Governors Gone Wild club.”

Dogged by suspicions that his campaign expenditures and his extramarital relationships were improperly entangled, Mr. Paterson heads into his second week on the job no longer the fresh face who symbolized a return to civility, but a weakened politician.

“Paterson’s persona has been really damaged,” a politics professor at Baruch College, Doug Muzzio, said. “On Monday, he was sitting on top of the world. It was, ‘I am David Paterson and I am governor of New York.’ It now becomes, ‘I am David Paterson and I am this philandering, pay-for-it-with-other-people’s-money type of guy,’”

For the third consecutive day, Mr. Paterson struggled to account for a 2002 payment, billed to the credit card of his campaign committee, for an Upper West Side hotel room where Mr. Paterson had a sexual liaison.

The governor, who served as lieutenant governor under Eliot Spitzer, has also been unable to explain the circumstances behind a $500 campaign payment to a woman with whom he was romantically involved.

Meanwhile, Paterson officials sought to provide details about more than $11,000 in payments that his campaign committee made between 2002 and 2007 to a 45-year-old woman, April Robbins-Bobyn, whose connection to Mr. Paterson is not clear.

A spokesman for Mr. Paterson identified her as a woman who served as a staffer in Mr. Paterson’s Senate Democratic office in Manhattan when Mr. Paterson served as Senate minority leader. The spokesman later said he was mistaken and that the woman was a campaign aide.

A receptionist who picked up the phone at the Senate Democratic office, however, said Ms. Robbins-Bobyn “no longer” works there. A blog posting from 2006 lists her as “director of special events” for Senator Paterson, with a government e-mail address of bobyn@senate.state.ny.us.

All of these governors and former governors have been, by the way, Democrats. No one is focusing on that, of-course. No one is saying that this highlights a particular problem with Democratic politicians in the Democrat-dominated New York/New Jersey area. And I’m not saying anyone should be saying that. No one has a copyright on weakness, nor on virtue. But I do wonder what the media’s angle would be had all of these philandering governors been Republicans.

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