Cheaters never win. Unless they're running for mayor in California

If you aspire to public office, you should know better than to cheat on your wife, feel up strangers in an elevator, or shag your best friend's spouse. Word will get around, some disgruntled aide will leak your smutty IM logs to a reporter, and you'll have to endure a week of lame Jay Leno monologues. But if you simply can't help yourself, at least do yourself a favor and do it in California, where the voters just don't seem to give a rat's ass.

The regular folk in that vast, God-fearing expanse known as Red America have never needed much excuse to think of the leftmost state in the lower 48 as a place seething with depravity, perversity, and outdoor hot tubs. Nevertheless, over the past 12 months, California's politicians have conspired to give it to them, in a big way. First came Arnold Schwarzenegger's successful campaign for reelection, which hardly stumbled over claims that the Gropinator had laid hands on virtually every woman who crossed his path on his way to the governor's mansion. Then, San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom admitted to a past affair with an underling who, oh yeah, happened to be married to his campaign manager. (Newsom's surprisingly effective defense: C'mon, I was drunk!) And just this summer, Los Angeles learned that its mayor, the pompous but popular Antonio Villaraigosa, had been getting it on with a local television anchor, the discovery of which had caused his long-suffering wife to file for divorce.

It's only to be expected that a state that's home to 12 percent of the country's population—and an outright majority of its bikini-clad roller-skating hotties—would produce an awful lot of goatish governors and randy representatives. But that's not the whole explanation. "The West Coast really is different," says blogger Luke Ford, who scooped the rest of the L.A. press by months on the story of Villaraigosa's marital meltdown. "People come to California to get away from their family, their upbringing, their traditions and their moral restraints. They come here to screw around. I know I did."

And while they may not be as pious as their counterparts in Utah or Kentucky, Californians know the meaning of "judge not, lest ye be judged."

That certainly seemed to hold true in the immediate aftermath of the revelation that Villaraigosa, who had been denying for months that he and his wife were living separately, admitted to an affair with tasty Telemundo anchor Mirthala Salinas, a serial politician-dater who had covered his career. "The people in the know here, the cognitive elite, certainly don't care," says Joel Kotkin, an L.A.-based commentator and author of California, Inc. "This city's got a pretty high tolerance for moral turpitude."

But it's also a city, and a state, that knows a convincing performance from a hollow one, and Villaraigosa's, in the days after his July 3 press conference confirming the affair, was bathed in flop sweat. As Villaraigosa flailed—insisting the relationship was a personal matter, even though his paramour was another public figure; getting booed by a crowd when he attempted a back-to-business appearance at a soccer rally; costing the city hundreds of millions of dollars when he appeared too distracted to lobby the legislature for his own pet program—the handicappers quickly revised their odds of survival downward. "My sense is that his career is finished," says Ford.

Is there any chance Villaraigosa will still be a viable candidate for governor in 2010, when Schwarzenegger steps down? "Two weeks ago, I would've said yes," says Tony Castro, a columnist for the Los Angeles Daily News who has covered Villaraigosa's entire career. "Right now, I just don't know. He's lost a lot of credibility."

Contrast his clumsy spin-control with the elegant maneuvering by Newsom, who promptly issued a public apology and packed himself off to rehab. Blaming bad behavior on a drinking problem may be a tad tired nowadays thanks to Mel Gibson, Mark Foley, et al., but it was persuasive enough to San Franciscans that Newsom's approval rating actually shot up a few percentage points.

"Telling the public that a politician engages in affairs is like telling them the dog may drink out of the toilet bowl," says Chris Lehane, a San Francisco–based strategist who has advised Bill Clinton, Al Gore, and John Kerry. "Everyone knows it, but that doesn't mean you talk about it all the time. People evaluate the official by how they handle it publicly when it does come up."