But Ensign slept with a subordinate who happened to be friends with his wife and married to one of his most trusted staff members. Sanford, meanwhile, went AWOL on his office and constituents and lied about traveling all the way to Argentina to hook up with his mistress -- over Father's Day weekend, no less. Multiply the betrayal times a factor of eight or nine and you're getting close to understanding the degree of unfaithfulness involved.

So the pundits, bloggers and operatives on the left line up with their bats to hammer home the obvious: Ensign and Sanford are colossal hypocrites for declaring themselves family guys to the electorate, then poisoning their marriages. And liberals keep beating that horse, long after rigor mortis sets in.

But there's a funny thing about the sudden emergence of so many principled lefties: Conservative hypocrites are called out, shouted down and beaten up, but liberal hypocrites get high fives.

When social conservatives are exposed as hypocrites, somber news conferences and public apologies are scheduled and leadership positions are resigned. Liberal hypocrisy, on the other hand, is simply accepted as the foundation of the Democratic Party's platform. In fact, hypocrisy tends to move Democrats up the leadership ladder.

Show me any issue dear to the hearts of liberals, and I'll show you a busload of elitist Washington hypocrites saying one thing and doing another.

Taxes? That so many of Barack Obama's Cabinet choices couldn't be troubled to pay their share of the taxes that they impose on the rest of us was just the tip of the iceberg. Take the death tax -- please.

Obama and his charges in Congress need lots of spending money for their social engineering experiments, so they desperately want to revive the federal estate tax, which is scheduled to die next year. They'd like to continue confiscating up to 45 percent of the wealth of people fortunate enough to have saved something for their heirs before dying.

Meanwhile, most of the wealthy patriarchs sitting in Congress have established family trusts to avoid paying estate taxes upon their own deaths. The Kennedy family is the most notorious of these, having dodged death taxes for generations by creating a web of trust funds to shield its nine-figure estate.

Remember that the late Sen. Howard Metzenbaum, D-Ohio, championed both his state's and the federal government's estate tax during his years in Washington. But before he died, he moved to Florida -- which has no estate tax.

Is anyone naive enough to believe that multimillionaire Democrats such as Ted Kennedy, John Kerry, Jay Rockefeller, Dianne Feinstein and Herb Kohl are eager to transfer half of their wealth to the unwashed masses through the estate tax? If the federal death tax is unearthed from its grave, they won't pay -- but they'll keep voting to make sure you might have to.

Education? Democrats consider themselves champions of this country's public school systems. Yet there's a mile-long line of Democrats who put their kids in private schools, then work feverishly to water down or drown legislation that would let Americans who can't afford private schools make that same choice. Charter school and voucher legislation is dead on arrival, per Democrats' masters in the teachers unions.

Energy? Democrats ride around in gas-guzzling limos and SUVs and fly around the world on private and military jets, and many live in mansions you and I could never dream of owning. But they sanctimoniously demand that we reduce our "carbon footprints" and pay higher energy prices through cap-and-trade schemes and new taxes on the natural resources that drive our economy.

When it was discovered that Al Gore, the world's foremost global warming alarmist, was burning through more power and fuel in a year than most people use in a lifetime, the greens defended their prophet by explaining that he buys some electricity from green sources and leads a "carbon-neutral" lifestyle. Whatever the rationalization, Gore remains an energy hog while arguing that we need to ditch our cars and shiver in the dark to save the planet.

Health care? Democrats have long said that health care is too expensive and that reforms must bring costs under control. Yet they continually vote to impose mandates on insurers and new costs on hospitals and doctors, and today they want to "reduce" costs by spending $1 trillion on a new government program.

Hypocrisy is a bipartisan endeavor in Washington and in state capitals across the country. It's a byproduct of the sense of privilege and entitlement that comes with serving in the country's highest offices. The same arrogance and self-righteousness that made Ensign and Sanford think they could pursue presidential ambitions and extramarital affairs at the same time drives Democrats to consider themselves immune from the big-government power grabs they adore.

None of them will be driving the hybrid tin cans they've ordered American automakers to mass produce. None of them will have to wait in line for rationed health care when Democrats are done with their medical "reforms." And none of them -- even so-called fiscal conservatives -- will ever pay down a dime of the national debt and stop deficit spending, no matter how many assurances of frugality we get.

Neither side of the aisle should be excused for living their lives or voting in ways that directly contradict their stated values and policy positions.

But it's also worth noting, as Peter Schweizer observed in his 2005 book "Do As I Say (Not As I Do)," that when social conservatives such as Ensign and Sanford take the wrong path, it causes great harm to themselves, their reputations, their families and their party. But when liberals play the part of hypocrite, they benefit personally while hurting the public through higher costs and reduced opportunity.

Now you tell me -- which form of hypocrisy is more worthy of our scorn?

Glenn Cook (gcook@reviewjournal.com) is a Review-Journal editorial writer.