There’s an old saw from the Democratic former governor of Louisiana, Edwin Edwards, about how the only thing that can tank your political aspirations is being found with a dead girl or a live boy. Edwards should know: he’s currently running for Congress after serving eight years on 17 charges for criminal corruption. Of all people, Edwin Edwards is probably enjoying the spectacle of various current and former GOP governors spinning through a lazy Susan of unappetizers and then spilling dip all over themselves.

Real scandal is back. How deliciously retro.

If you like to watch scandals – and I mean really watch them, like you would a soap opera – there’s nothing better than Christian conservative Bob McDonnell, the former governor of Virginia. McDonnell is currently on trial for 14 counts of public corruption, and the jury could start deliberations this weekend. But McDonnell has managed to make the trial seem like a convoluted prelude to the revelation that, throughout the proceedings, he’s been living, while separated from his wife, with a priest who got busted for cruising dudes in parking lots.

It didn’t have to be this bad. McDonnell was charged just days after handing over the keys to the governor’s mansion to Terry McAuliffe (a career Democratic operative whose charm could be summed up by a cartoon of him interrupting his dying father’s last words with a theatrical shushing gesture, then waving his iPhone to show him Bill Clinton on the caller ID). But term limits forced McDonnell out, not an electoral loss. He still could’ve been a contender.

Even the corruption might not have been enough to end his career, Edwards’ prediction aside. Party faithful forgive, and in a party that wins almost exclusively by ginning up its base against an ever-present enemy, who knows what obstacles could have been overcome? McDonnell was charged with accepting over $177,000 in gifts and loans from Star Scientific Inc CEO Johnnie Williams, but he repaid over $124,000, and his defense has offered a lot to distract from the idea that Williams expected McDonnell to dispense his dietary supplement Anatabloc to state employees – or at least to give it some official government imprimatur. Maybe Williams, the defense suggested, was offering a lifeline to Mobo Real Estate by investing in struggling rental properties McDonnell held with his sister Maureen. Smarter voters have been fooled by dumber distractions before.

The problem is that much of the chaff that McDonnell’s defense has fired up involved his wife. The defense portrayed the McDonnells’ marriage as struggling at best and his wife Maureen (yes, he married a woman with the same name as his sister, and that’s a footnote) as a lonely woman expensively overdosing on retail therapy to fill the void in her life. Johnnie Williams, they’ve said, became her “favorite playmate”, and the two exchanged 1,200 calls and text messages over several months. Further, she was supposedly to blame for the governor’s interest in Antabloc, owing to a history of being “passionate” about “neutraceuticals” (which sound like medicinal fake testicles).

Burying your wife in the courtroom is kind of a bad deal when you want to be a future candidate for the family values party – more so when burying her involves admitting to loveless cohabitation while some rich dude bought her five-figure outfits. It gets even worse when you are proud of the fact that you went to Pat Robertson’s God Hates Facts pay-and-print diploma mill Regents University, where you wrote, “Every level of government should statutorially and procedurally prefer married couples over cohabitators, homosexuals, and fornicators.”

So it gets fantastically worse when you describe your marriage as on “hold” and live during the trial with your parish priest, Rev Wayne Ball of St. Patrick’s Catholic Church, whose assignations Talking Points Memo delicately summarizes as thus:

Ball, then pastor of Holy Trinity Catholic Church in Norfolk, pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of frequenting a bawdy place. Other media reports defined that as a place used for “lewdness, assignation or prostitution.” Norfolk police had arrested Ball and another Richmond man the night before Thanksgiving when they were found together in a parked car in a local park.

Look, this is polite journalism speak for “guy who is supposed to be celibate and certainly not gay was at the very least bashing bishops with some midshipman he picked up at a bar near the port”. And, look, that’s fine. Clerical celibacy and civil rights restrictions on homosexuals are both silly, and it shouldn’t matter to anyone at all if it turned out that McDonnell and the pastor were doing trial prep via a two-man dildo ouroboros. It would only be thematically fitting, after McDonnell entered the national consciousness as Governor “Let Us Ultrasound You With This Wand, Strumpet”.

But this is where McDonnell joins Texas governor Rick Perry (currently under indictment on corruption charges) and New Jersey governor Chris Christie (whose Bridgegate fame isn’t yet overshadowed by other corruption investigations) in bringing back good, old-fashioned red meat scandals. These aren’t the horrible antiseptic scandals of Romneyworld, where, yes, the man had a car elevator and a designer horse and offshore accounts and a creepy vulture business – and all these things were probably immoral and certainly awful but still perfectly legal. This is the closest we’ve been in ages to Mark Foley asking interns “did you spank it this weekend yourself” on AOL Instant Messenger, the home of “a/s/l?” and “wanna cyber?”.

Because McDonnell might have lost his last job by law, but now he’s also lost a nationally viable record to run on, and he might have lost his wife. And now, a man who penned a screwheaded thesis that said, “When man’s basic inclination is towards evil [such as] homosexuality, the government must restrain, punish and deter,” has shacked up with a priest who probably is homosexual – which means he’s probably lost the protection of his state, his party and his God.

When it comes to scandal, that’s how you do it.