Scorned Woman Scorecard

It's definitely not Stand By Your Man Month as Mark Sanford's wife and Bernard Madoff's mistress join Elizabeth Edwards in going public to take whacks at the cheating hearts in their lives.

After throwing out her lovesick husband, Jenny Sanford is posing for Vogue and telling an interviewer that the South Carolina governor, with whom she was not "madly in love" when she married him, “has got some issues that he needs to work on, about happiness and what happiness means...I think when a lot of men get to this midpoint in life, they start asking questions that they probably should have asked a long time ago.”

Meanwhile, a book by a married woman who had a fling with him reveals that Madoff, who was a powerhouse in grabbing other people's money, including her own, was otherwise "not well endowed" and a nervous lover to boot, avoiding her embrace in a hotel elevator on their first tryst for fear of being caught by surveillance cameras.

Such comedowns follow Elizabeth Edward's book about her husband's affair while using her terminal illness as an asset in his run for president and the news this week that he is ready to admit paternity of the child he fathered with the other woman.

There is "no such thing as a private affair anymore," Maureen Dowd writes today. "We live in a transparent era atwitter with indecent exposure."

True enough, but there are compensations. We can bury once and for all, the old adage about adultery that "it's always the woman who pays." Today there is some compensation with fashion magazine interviews, appearances on Oprah and book royalties.