This just happened a couple of hours ago.

Rep. Mark Foley, R-Fla., resigned from Congress on Friday, effective immediately, in the wake of questions about e-mails he wrote a former male page.

"I am deeply sorry and I apologize for letting down my family and the people of Florida I have had the privilege to represent," he said in a statement issued by his office.

The two-sentence statement did not refer to the e-mails and gave no reason for Foley's decision to abruptly abandon a flourishing career in Congress.

This comes on the heels of his staffers' efforts to blame Democrats for the story getting out, which doesn't really make Foley look that good, either.

Foley's aides initially blamed Democratic rival Tim Mahoney and Democrats with attempting to smear the congressman before the election....

..."They've been shopping this around to reporters for weeks now. They want a headline and that's it. It's a political smear campaign of the worst kind," Kello said.

Is the scandal about how the story got out, or what the story is?

For the record, Democrat Tim Mahoney's campaign says that Foley should be considered innocent until proven guilty.

The campaign for Mahoney, who trails Foley in the polls, said it didn't release the e-mails and wouldn't make them part of the campaign. In a statement released by Mahoney spokesman Jessica Santillo, the campaign referred to the boy as an "alleged victim."

"The seriousness of these allegations goes far beyond the tit for tat of a political campaign," Santillo said. "This is a matter for the appropriate authorities to investigate. I believe Mr. Foley deserves the benefit of the doubt until these allegations are proven true or false."

The sudden resignation surprised me, and it seems to indicate that maybe there's something to those allegations. The emails themselves do seem to be pretty creepy, and I can't say I'd want my son receiving such attention from any middle-aged man, let alone a powerful Republican politician in Washington.

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