Virginia Democratic Gov. Ralph Northam either did or did not appear either in blackface or in Ku Klux Klan robes 34 years ago in a yearbook photograph while he was a medical student. The picture appears with his name, he apparently once was jocularly known as “Coonman” and he certainly appeared in blackface on a different occasion as part of a Michael Jackson costume worn in a dance contest that — well, let’s just quote the governor himself here: “I actually won the contest because I had learned to do the moonwalk.”

Northam must go, as a matter of character. On that we have the word of such figures as Joe Biden, a plagiarist who once cited his ability to navigate the linguistic challenges of buying coffee at a 7-Eleven as evidence of his good relations with the Indian immigrant community; Terry McAuliffe, a former fixer for Bill Clinton; former Virginia Gov. Douglas Wilder, who once used a government airplane to pay a private visit to a former softcore porn actress he appointed as a university regent; Sen. Bernie Sanders, author of bizarre rape-fantasy political tracts; Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Cherokee impersonator; and Hillary Rodham Clinton, chief tactician of the “bimbo eruption” unit all those years ago.

If Northam goes, the governorship passes to fellow Democrat, Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax, who now faces impeachment as two women have come forward to accuse him of sexual misconduct — at the 2004 Democratic National Convention and at Duke University in 2000.

The Democrats, hot off insisting that mere accusations of misconduct — as a high-school student — were sufficient to keep Brett Kavanaugh off the Supreme Court, are thereby put in a pickle. They might turn to the second in line, Attorney General Mark R. Herring, also a Democrat — and also someone who recently acknowledged wearing blackface at a college party. That would bring the Dems to the third in line, House Speaker Kirk Cox, who insists he’s never donned the racist makeup. He is also a Republican.

One might well wonder if every young man attending college parties in Virginia in the 1980s wore blackface at some point. If you happen to be familiar with fraternity life in the South during that period, then you know that sort of thing was shockingly common. And it never entirely went away: In 2002 Zeta Psi and the Kappa Alpha Order were nearly removed from the University of Virginia entirely after a blackface incident.

The Democratic Party is in the grips of a moral panic having to do in part with Donald Trump and #MeToo. In another aspect, it is a belated and desultory reckoning with the fact that Democrats have for a long time been willing to overlook a great deal of bad behavior in pursuit of power: not only Bill Clinton’s shenanigans (and those of a couple of Kennedys and many others before him) but also the footsie-playing with anti-Semites that has been so lamentably common among African-American Democrats from Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton to Barack Obama and Ilhan Omar. It is difficult to run a campaign of moral indictment against Trump when the best alternative you had to offer was a Clinton.

What’s lacking is perspective and judgment. Given his scurrilous campaign against his Republican challenger Ed Gillespie, Northam does not deserve the benefit of the doubt, but no serious-minded person believes he is a closet white supremacist or that he hasn’t grown up a bit since he was a 24-year-old graduate student. The accusations against Fairfax are both more serious and more recent. But the new progressive puritanism, powered by social media, inhibits their ability to make such distinctions.

The irony is that the Democrats do not know how and when to move on. About 22 minutes into Bill Clinton’s intern-diddling scandal, Democratic activists formed a group called MoveOn.org, whose members argued that it was time to “move on” from the president’s misdeeds, which involved not only adultery but also perjury and suborning perjury — serious matters for the nation’s chief law-enforcement officer. That was then. In 2019, MoveOn.org is calling for Northam’s resignation because of an episode combining callousness with bad taste 34 years ago — many years before the original event from which MoveOn.org wanted to move on.

The Democrats are simultaneously attempting to enforce a zero-tolerance approach to these scandals while also handing out plenary indulgences to such figures as Sen. Warren, whose career as a “professor of color” is in many ways more repugnant than literal blackface. Democrats want a zero-tolerance rule that doesn’t cost them very much — puritanism on the cheap, morally speaking.

That is not going to work out well.

Have a look at that 2020 Democratic presidential field and ask which among them has a clean hand to cast the first stone. Biden? Clinton? Warren? If Democrats think they are going to find an unblemished champion, they should think again.