Two decades later, he divorced his second wife not long after she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. During that marriage, he carried on an affair with a junior House staffer even as he served as speaker while impeaching President Bill Clinton for lying about sex. The staffer is now his third wife.

In a profile in the latest issue of Esquire magazine, with which Mr. Gingrich cooperated, the second wife, Marianne, said, “He believes that what he says in public and how he lives don’t have to be connected.”

Mr. Gingrich has played the religious card before. Fifteen years ago, at Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University, he said that the core of the United States’ travails was a lost “personal relationship with God.” In response to a question from a young Richmond Times Dispatch reporter — Mike Allen, now a Washington journalist — he admitted that he seldom attended services because redistricting by Democrats had placed his church outside his congressional district.

The man who assails Democrats’ ethics and the White House’s “corrupt, Chicago-style political machine,” is the only speaker of the House to be officially sanctioned by his colleagues. He was ordered to pay a record $300,000 penalty after the House ethics committee determined he had deceived investigators and used tax-exempt funds he had raised for disadvantaged kids for political purposes.

He has long had a penchant for linking opponents with Hitler or Nazis.

In the 1980s, he likened a proposal on Nicaragua by a Democratic congressman, Lee Hamilton of Indiana, to the horrors of Auschwitz; he said that the Democrats’ actions in a recount of an inconclusive Indiana House race reminded him of the dictum by the German Protestant pastor Martin Niemöller that the failure of his countrymen to speak out when Hitler went after the Jews and other groups meant that when “the Nazis came for me, there was no one left to speak up.”

Mr. Gingrich, usually interesting as well as provocative, reinvents facts and himself. The imam of the proposed New York mosque is not the radical he describes; Mr. Abdul Rauf is a harsh critic of Islamic extremists, an apostle of interfaith dialogue and was a consultant to the F.B.I.

Mr. Gingrich regales party activists and younger journalists with tales of his critical role in the economic successes of the 1990s. The realities: the 1993 budget measure, with tax hikes, which he opposed, contributed more to deficit reduction than any deals he negotiated during his four years as speaker; the overhaul of welfare was about 80 percent the doing of Mr. Clinton, who consistently rolled the hapless Mr. Gingrich, a major factor in the Republican move to oust their speaker after the 1998 elections.