"Birds do it. Bees do it. Even educated fleas do it?"

- Cole Porter,

"Let's Fall in Love" POLITICIANS do it, too, though love doesn't seem often to have a whole lot to do with "it."

Eliot Spitzer's business with a prostitute has faded from the news for now, but expect a comeback. The feds are pondering whether to make a literal federal case of the matter by filing criminal charges. After using the dalliance as a noisemaker, the government can hardly just walk away with a ho-hum and shrug.

And you can bet we'll be seeing and hearing more of Ashley Alexandra Dupre, formerly just Kristen. The negotiations must be fierce for a photo shoot and a tell-all. Hustler Larry Flynt has already bid a million dollars but suspects that will be too low even as an opener.

The stock market may be down, but the futures in prurience never flag. It has been ever thus.

Our very founders were busy boys. Benjamin Franklin had a son on the side. Alexander Hamilton admitted to an affair with the wife of a con man. DNA tells us Thomas Jefferson almost surely had at least one child with his slave Sally Hemings, herself the half-sister of Jefferson's wife.

Presidents have kept the tradition going. Grover Cleveland, in the late 1800s, had an out-of-wedlock child. His political opponents mocked him with the ditty "Ma, ma, where's my pa? Gone to the White House ha-ha-ha."

Warren Harding had his Nan Britton; Franklin Roosevelt,

Lucy Mercer. Bill Clinton had Monica, or was it vise versa? John Kennedy was spared notoriety in his lifetime by the long-standing gentlemen's agreement between reporters and elected officials that private hanky-panky was none of the public's business.

(Unless, that is, a politician made it so, as Congressman Wilbur Mills did in 1974 when he was caught splashing it up in D.C.'s Tidal Basin with stripper Fanne Foxe in a bad remake of "La Dolce Vita.")

The last few years have harvested a bumper crop of philanderers - Sen. David Vitter, House Speakers Newt Gingrich and Bob Livingston, Reps. Mark Foley and Randy Cunningham. Sen. Larry Craig was caught doing the men's room tap dance. James McGreevey quit as New Jersey governor when he was outed as gay, and now a long-time aide says he, McGreevey and McGreevey's then-fiancC), later wife, used to do threesomes.

Despite those and many more such tales, Americans remain peculiarly vulnerable to surprise when a new sex scandal breaks out. We still haven't cleared our civic genes of their seminal Puritanism.

Europeans enjoy their sex scandals for whatever trinkets of titillation they bring and then are done with them. Here, the media solemnly convert scandal into pop psychology. Was the woman abused as a child and thus denied a sense of self worth? Are A-type men wired for daredevil sex? And thus a perfectly good spicy story gets dragged off into phony introspection.

We could finally have our full due of vicarious whoopee if we'd quit fretting so about other folks' sin maybe going unpunished. As Cole Porter put it in another song - "Love for Sale" - "Who's prepared to pay the price / for a trip to paradise?" Four thousand, three hundred dollars an hour isn't punishment enough?