By a certain measure, the last people who believed in the marriage of Bob McDonnell, the former Governor of Virginia, and his wife, Maureen, were the twelve jurors who, on Thursday, found them guilty of public corruption. Their lawyers had tried to argue that the Governor and his wife were so estranged that they could not conspire to sell official favors: they floated past each other in the executive mansion in separate pockets of misery. The governor did favors for a man named Jonnie Williams, who sold a nutritional supplement called Anatabloc; Maureen let Williams buy her expensive clothes. But the quid and the quo, their lawyers said, were barely on speaking terms. When the verdict was read, McDonnell cried openly, according to press reports, and then left the courthouse without his wife.

The miserable-marriage defense was, most strikingly, humiliating; it involved testimony about both of their failures as spouses—about tantrums, petty grubbing, and lovelessness. As the jury seems to have recognized, though, the stories about Maureen’s fascination with Williams and Bob’s emotional absence were never more than a distraction. The defense didn’t make legal or emotional sense, and it didn’t fit the facts of the case. There is no requirement, in the law or anywhere else, that we love our co-conspirators, or even that we find them tolerable. A couple can be spiteful and venal all at once. McDonnell sent e-mails to his wife about how tired he was of her yelling at him; he also sent an e-mail to Williams about a fifty-thousand-dollar loan and, six minutes later, sent a note to a member of his staff saying, "see me about anatabloc issues." That doesn’t sound like a wife looking for comfort; it sounds like a husband who wants money.

Maureen McDonnell did some of the favors, like appearing at conventions to talk about Anatabloc; Bob McDonnell got some of the gifts, like thousands of dollars worth of gear, food, and rounds of golf at a country club. Maureen was convicted on eight counts, and Bob was convicted on eleven. Other benefits went to their five adult children: a plane ride to a bachelorette party, fifteen thousand dollars for the catering of a wedding, more golf gear. Some of the testimony involved Maureen pushing them, at Christmas, to sign various papers that would help to mask her ownership of stock in Williams’s company. It does not sound like a particularly joyous holiday. By the defense’s lights, that made it implausible as the setting for criminal behavior, as though it’s only picture-book couples who sit and chat about ways to abuse the public trust. If anything, that sort of behavior seems more likely to emerge from a bad marriage than from a good one. The discontent and the hollowness of the McDonnell marriage might make it easier to understand how a man who has performed decades of public service—and was once a possible Republican Vice-Presidential choice—could betray his office for some money from a vitamin salesman. Deep unhappiness doesn’t always keep a person honest.

One of the witnesses at the trial was the McDonnells’ older daughter, Jeanine Zubowsky. She and her husband got a ten-thousand-dollar check from Williams as a wedding present—he’d originally wanted to buy them a generator, but that got complicated. (He didn’t pay for their caterer; that was for her sister’s wedding.) Jeanine told the jurors that she loved her parents, but that by the time her father became Governor any affection between them was an “act.” (“Any time they went into a public setting, it was like a switch flipped.”) Her mother had worked as a waitress and a secretary while her father was in law school. Afterward, he became a prosecutor, and she would drink at home and watch soap operas or go out and shop, which, on a public servant’s salary, was even less practical than it would be otherwise. Zubowsky was a defense witness; she testified that her mother would hide some of her purchases from her father, a detail that her parents’ lawyers probably thought would help. She described fights about money, her father confiding that “I don't know what to do anymore. I can’t make her happy anymore,” and the idea, when McDonnell became someone important—a man with an executive mansion—that things would all work out. But after his election, Zubowsky said, “The fantasy of what they thought it would be like was a lot easier to accept than the reality.” What is the fantasy of the life of a politician in America, or that of a political wife? One of the gifts Maureen McDonnell got Jonnie Williams to buy was a Rolex watch that she gave to her husband, which bore an inscription: “71st Governor of Virginia.”