KEY POINTS:
I sincerely don't want to know about Angela Merkel's sex life - or Gordon Brown's, or Helen Clark's.
In truth, nails on a chalkboard would have been more pleasant than hearing our ministers in Parliament explain publicly some months ago how many times he or she had been
to a strip club.
Who knows, we're bound to ask them at what age they lost their virginity by Election Day. I live in fear.
The dirty truth is, with rare exceptions, a public figure's sexuality is none of our business. No matter who you are.
So you sleep with an albacore tuna every weekend? Then godspeed to you and your seafood choices in life. The only time I have a right to comment about you and your little sushi is if you choose to tell me.
Don't get me wrong, if you're doing something illegal, I'll be only too delighted to shove a camera up your nose, but if your shag-a-delicacies are just plain old morally repugnant, it's not my turf - or my job as a member of the press.
Let's be honest, you can have an affair with an entire Roundtable, but in 98 per cent of the cases the only reason the press chooses to publish it is because it's good dirt.
There's even a proud journalistic tradition of dishing it artfully.
We tell ourselves: It's really a story about hypocrisy, or character, or financial impropriety (maybe), or electability, or negative campaigning, as Timothy Noah listed in Slate magazine in his user's guide to selling sleaze.
Just throw in some highbrow press credos to disguise the fact it's someone else's private mud - and suddenly you're actually doing everyone a public service.
This week I read an account of economist John Maynard Keynes' two secret diaries, one kept in code that chronicled his gay lovers outside his 20-year marriage.
It was only at the point where the article's author was speculating what Keynes' three letters, "C, W, or A" would have stood for beside each entry that the pants dropped for me.
This was a secret diary. He wrote the entries in code. What are the odds he wanted thousands of pervy readers like me sitting in the privacy of their own peccadilloes to be given that information? Okay, he's dead now, so that means all bets are off?
I was supposed to care that Don Brash represented himself as a man of family values but maybe wasn't living them in his personal life. I didn't.
If he chooses to be hypocritical at home, the man has to pay for his own therapy bills. It's his problem, until somebody in the press makes it mine.
As a member of the public and the media, my dibs on his life stop at the point where it significantly impacts on the job we were paying him to do. Do you really think that because his reported lover was from the Business Roundtable, that sanctioned the story to be in our best interest?
This past week the New York Times ran a front-page story on John McCain's relationship with a female lobbyist eight years ago.
The paper didn't prove that he had an affair, though we were graciously told her age, 40, to his 71 (why?) and got to see an attractive picture of her in a gold evening gown.
In fact, the story does say they both deny having a sexual relationship. Who knows?
What this glorious example of misguided motivations actually told us was that his advisers were concerned that it looked like he was having an affair.
The story showed no proof of undue influence. It showed proof that we in the hallowed Fourth Estate are just as interested in gossip at the pub as anyone else, except some of us choose to print it and declare it's for our own good.
When you go to bed at night with your conscience (and your albacore tuna, God bless), before you judge any public figure, ask yourself at what point do you have a right to step into their personal choices.
It's not our job to hoist our very human leaders on to a pedestal in their private lives. In the past, that measure of perfection was fiction.
If we apply today's all-exposing, 24/7 moral compass to our most dynamic leaders historically, we'd have to biff out Jefferson, J.F.K., Lange and even Gandhi. Some of these men weren't nearly as illustrious behind closed doors. We just didn't write about it then.
Human nature hasn't changed; it's just that our public scrutiny of private lives has.
Maybe the emperor isn't wearing any clothes. But we've forgotten that the most important judgment is whether he's been a good ruler.
