Dennis Hastert’s indictment raised many questions. What was never in doubt was that the answers would be, in some way, sad. Photograph by Doug Mills/The New York Times/Redux

Dennis Hastert may have kept a secret for more than forty years, but, once it was hinted at, it lasted less than a day. On Thursday afternoon, an indictment was unsealed alleging that, sometime in 2010, Hastert, the former Republican Speaker of the House, sat down with a person who had once lived in the same part of Illinois as Hastert, and talked about a wrong that Hastert had done many years earlier. They met a few more times, and Hastert agreed to pay three and a half million dollars, "to compensate for and conceal his prior misconduct against Individual A." The crimes that Hastert was charged with—evading banking regulations, lying to federal agents—were fairly technical, but the language of the indictment was vague enough, and the dollar amount big enough, to accommodate the wildest scenarios (darkened roads, shovels in the trunk). And yet there was a sense, from the beginning, that the main questions would turn out to be pretty basic: What gender was the person (the indictment was careful about pronouns), was what happened sexual, and how old had each of them been? Also: Did the story involve a betrayal and, if so, on what vulnerabilities did it play? (Hastert was a high-school wrestling coach and teacher in Yorkville, Illinois, from 1965 to 1981, something the indictment mentioned.) The indictment referred, after all, to a wrong, not a relationship. Were we talking about coercion, or even violence, and what particular hypocrisies would this all turn out to illustrate? What was never in question was that the answers would be, in some way, sad.

By Friday, there was more information, in news reports quoting unnamed law-enforcement officials. "It was sex," one of those sources told the Los Angeles Times, and Individual A was a man; follow-up stories made it clear that the alleged abuse would have taken place when he was a boy in high school, and that there was an Individual B, who had given a similar account to law enforcement (without getting money from Hastert). The New York Times reported that the first man "told the F.B.I. that he had been inappropriately touched by Mr. Hastert," and added that its sources said that investigators hadn't substantiated the allegations. They didn't have to, to charge Hastert with a financial crime. (Hastert has not yet commented on either aspect of the indictment.)

The crime Hastert was actually charged with was, in some ways, arcane. When there is a cash transfer of more than ten thousand dollars, a bank is supposed to note it. The idea is to make things like money laundering, tax evasion, and drug deals harder. Hastert's banks (he used more than one) did so when he made a series of fifty-thousand dollar withdrawals. He then changed his methods, making many more withdrawals just under the ten-thousand-dollar threshold. But, as he should have known, bank systems and the law are designed to pick up this kind of evasion. The I.R.S. and then the F.B.I. began investigating; one of the questions they asked was whether the transactions were tied to public corruption. They concluded that it was private, but not before Hastert allegedly broke another law by lying to them. According to the indictment, the man who for eight years was second in line to move into the White House, if both the President and the Vice-President were incapacitated, told agents that he was taking all that cash out of the bank because he didn't trust the safety of the American banking system.

One can put that in the category of proffered hypocrisies. When the news of the indictment broke, many accounts stuck to the theme that every last person who knew Hastert was shocked—during his fast rise in Congress, he was supposedly known, as the Washington Post put it, for having "no skeletons" in the closet. That this might have been the case, even though Hastert was known to have made millions of dollars on a deal involving land bought cheaply and sold, at a striking profit, after he had pushed plans through Congress for a nearby highway, says something about what counts as a skeleton in Washington.

Hastert became Speaker because Newt Gingrich had just crashed and burned, and because the next in line, Bob Livingston, worried that, in the wake of Bill Clinton's Lewinsky-related impeachment, his own extramarital affairs would come out. Hastert lost the job when he mishandled the scandal that erupted when Representative Mark Foley, Republican of Florida, was discovered to have sent sexual messages to teen-age male congressional pages. Hastert’s clumsiness on that count, and his failure to protect the pages, seems easier to explain now. And his many protestations that he might not be worthy of the Speaker's job—he told reporters that he took it only after praying on it—look less like humility, if they ever did. After leaving Congress, Hastert made a great deal more money as a lobbyist, a business in which one of his two sons was already engaged while Hastert had been Speaker. (Hastert has been married since 1973.)

“He was the coach,” Representative Peter King, Republican of New York, told the Times. “He was a solid guy, he never raised his voice. This has really come out of nowhere.” One of the few institutions to cut to the chase in the hours before details about the alleged abuse became known was the high school in Yorkville where Hastert had worked. It issued a statement saying that it had never received any complaints about him. Silence in a small Midwestern town in the nineteen-sixties and seventies can mean more than one thing.

There may be a tendency to wonder, when considering a story like Hastert's, if this is what happens when people have to bury who they are. Homophobia has painfully contracted countless lives. But that diagnosis seems somewhat off here: Individual A was a high-school student, and so almost certainly a minor, and Hastert was a coach. There is something different about that, even before one gets to, say, Hastert's drive for a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, or his work to pass the privacy-invading Patriot Act—though those are worth mentioning, too.

The money, the indictment said, was "to compensate for and conceal" whatever Hastert had done. There is a knife's edge in that "and." How much was compensation, and for what sort of damage, and how much was concealment? How did the alleged victim figure in the question of his own privacy, if at all? Blackmail and extortion are complicated and, in cases of personal wrong, ambiguous acts to begin with—even more so than banking-record laws. There is a great deal in this story that is still concealed and, when one looks at Hastert's entire career, uncompensated for.

Jonathan Franzen, in a Profile of Hastert for The New Yorker in 2003, wrote, "When I asked him how he felt about the impeachment of Bill Clinton, four and a half years after, he described Clinton's loss of credibility as 'a personal tragedy.' Later, I asked him about Watergate and Richard Nixon. 'A tragedy,' he said. The legal woes of Illinois Governor George Ryan? 'A tragedy.'" Maybe Hastert sees his own case that way. But whose tragedy is it? The larger problem comes when Washington is so full of tragedies that it begins to look like one great farce.