And, given the disastrous turn his stint as acting governor has taken, this recognition will almost certainly be coupled with a second epiphany—that there will be no other opportunities in the future to seek major office. With his exit from the governorship, Paterson's political career will be over.

As disappointing as it surely will be for Paterson to reach this conclusion, there will be a potential silver lining for him: With nothing left to lose politically but plenty of time left to govern, he could wind up an unusually liberated and active lame duck. Paterson figures to enjoy an extended period of relatively care-free governing, an opportunity that Eliot Spitzer, his immediate predecessor—who banished himself from office days after his sex scandal broke last year—didn't get to enjoy

Whether Paterson will grasp and seize the possibilities afforded by such freedom remains to be seen. But we don't need to look far to find an example of another doomed governor who managed to leave a mark on his way out the door.

That would be James E. McGreevey, the onetime governor of New Jersey who remains best known for telling the world, with his wife by his side, "I am a gay American." McGreevey, a boundlessly ambitious politician who believed the State House in Trenton would catapult him to the White House, made that admission in August 2004, two and a half years into his first term.

He was under duress—the man he'd appointed to a top homeland security post despite his complete lack of qualifications for the job had been threatening to go public with word of their affair, along with accusations of sexual harassment—and already facing an ominous federal criminal investigation into his fund-raising activities. (Just a few months before his "gay American" speech, McGreevey's voice had turned up on a federal wire, uttering a code word—"Machiavelli," ironically enough—that seemed to signal his participation in a bid to shake down a farmer seeking assistance from the state for a hefty campaign contribution.)

Dealing with all of this would be traumatic for any politician, or any human being, for that matter. But it was particularly wrenching for McGreevey because he had devoted virtually every minute of every day since his youth to a grueling, often cutthroat climb up the political ladder. He had no life outside of politics, no apparent interests, hobbies, aspirations or dreams that had to do with anything other than the pursuit of fame and glory on the national political stage. He'd come remarkably close to his goal—weeks after he'd won the governorship in 2001, McGreevey was off to Iowa to pay an introductory call on labor leaders in the lead-off caucus state—but on that hot August day, it had all come to a crashing halt, instantly and permanently.

Because he didn't have the faintest idea what to do with his life, or how to pay for whatever he decided to do, McGreevey resisted calls to resign on the spot. Instead, he set a departure date of Nov. 15, making him a lame duck governor for just over three months. In the end, this period was marked mostly by its awkwardness—McGreevey made a handful of public appearances, always with the press kept at a distance—but McGreevey also managed to make one significant substantive contribution that, absent the curious circumstances, he (or any governor) would never have made.

The subject was campaign finance reform, an issue for which McGreevey was the world's most unlikely champion. Oh sure, as a politician, he'd always paid lip service to the idea; one of his campaign refrains in 2001 was a promise "to change the way Trenton does business."

But this was mere window-dressing, something to make the good-government suburbanites weak in the knees. Even by New Jersey's depressing standards, McGreevey's addiction to political money, almost all of it raised by implied threats and promises, was astounding.

When he finally reached the governor's office in January 2002, McGreevey had sold off every bit of his independence to the state's various party bosses, fund-raising bundlers and labor leaders. His governorship, it was said, was a throwback—the first time in decades that New Jersey's old Democratic machines had installed their own governor.

Not surprisingly, his pre-August '04 tenure was defined by efforts to appease these power brokers. With his popularity sagging, McGreevey was facing a possible primary challenge in 2005 from Senator Jon Corzine. By the spring and summer of '04, McGreevey needed the bosses and party chiefs more than ever. Without them, he'd be doomed.

This explains why, in June '04, McGreevey championed a laughably loophole-riddled "ethics reform bill" drafted by his party's Assembly leadership—an effort to claim credit for reform without actually enacting any. When he signed the worthless reforms, McGreevey branded them "the strongest ethics standards in the country," which might have been true had the country in question been Mexico.

But after August '04, with his lifelong dream destroyed forever, McGreevey realized that he no longer had to do the bosses' bidding. The fact that they'd so quickly disowned him as soon as he'd announced his resignation probably encouraged this thinking. In September, he decided to revisit the campaign finance issue, even though only two months before he'd pronounced the Assembly's lame effort a complete success.

As a lame duck, McGreevey had no clout with the legislature, but he retained broad powers of executive order, and he decided to use them. In the middle of September, he called a press conference to announce that, with the stroke of his pen, he'd banned all vendors doing business with the state from making contributions of state and county political parties and to gubernatorial candidates—a very meaningful change to New Jersey's status quo. The bosses seethed.

In making the announcement, McGreevey noted that his newfound freedom had liberated him "to confront challenges I have avoided in the past."

"I do not hold on to some hopeful notion that I will be known for much more than as the governor who resigned," he said, "and I am at peace with that. I ask: If not now, when, and does timing really take away from the merits of the action itself?"

David Rebovich, an incisive political scientist from Rider University who passed away in 2007, summed up McGreevey's move perfectly: "What McGreevey is doing is taking his own political crisis and trying to put it to good use. The man who became governor because he understood the game and promised to return old favors found himself swallowed up by the system and wants to correct it. And so it's payback time."

Of course, it wasn't all a happy ending. As sweeping as it was—national watchdog groups declared that McGreevey's reforms brought the state to the forefront of national reform efforts—the executive order contained numerous loopholes, many of which persist to this day. The new rules had an impact, but, four years later, it's clear they didn't fundamentally change New Jersey's political culture. Still, McGreevey's action represented the boldest campaign finance reforms enacted by any Garden State governor in the modern era. And it never would have happened if McGreevey had believed he had a political future.

We'll soon see if Paterson has any similar instincts.

As of today, I still believe this is true, but the events of the past week have made clear that the trend is working against Paterson. Six months ago, he was broadly popular, both for his personality and his job performance. A few weeks ago, he was still well-liked, but moving into shaky territory in his job performance numbers. Now, after enduring days of rotten press coverage for his handling of the Senate appointment, the governor’s standing in polls has never been lower.

A Siena survey released on Wednesday found that 54 percent of voters now view Paterson favorably, compared to 30 percent who don’t – the first time he’s cracked 30 percent in the unfavorable category. More worryingly, a Siena poll from earlier in the week gave him a 51-45 percent approval rating. Matched against Cuomo in a prospective primary, the survey gave Paterson a statistically insignificant 36-34 percent advantage, with Cuomo running seven points better than the governor in a potential fall ’10 match-up with Rudy Giuliani.

Again, if he had to make a decision today, Cuomo – who, it’s safe to assume, would like to run for governor next year – would probably pass, however reluctantly. Yes, Paterson is clearly vulnerable, but he’s also still popular enough to win. And that would make taking him on too risky a proposition for Cuomo, who must weigh his considerable ambition against this cold, hard reality: one more loss, and you’re done for good.

It has been a long road back to Cuomo from that late summer day in 2002 when he was pressured to end his hopeless bid for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination, bowing to a party establishment that he’d alienated and that was closing ranks behind Carl McCall, who then became the first black gubernatorial nominee in New York history. Cuomo emerged from the wreckage of his ’02 effort a bloodied and polarizing figure.

Quietly and doggedly, he tended to his relationships with key Democrats and the black community over the next four years, work that paid off in his election as attorney general in 2006 – a post Cuomo, like his predecessor Eliot Spitzer, has shrewdly used to build popularity through the high-profile pursuit of loathsome characters. Giving up that office to wage a primary campaign against the first black Democratic governor would represent a significant risk for Cuomo; a 50-50 chance of victory probably wouldn’t be enough to get him in.

But Cuomo doesn’t have to make a decision today, or tomorrow, or next week, or even next month. The primary won’t take place until September 2010. He has the luxury of waiting until late next winter, fully a year from now, before gauging Paterson’s vulnerability. In the meantime, he can gobble up more enviable press and push his popularity even higher (his favorable/unfavorable rating stands at 64/17, according to one on this week’s Siena polls).

For his part, Paterson must find a way to arrest the long and steady decline of his popularity. The stratospheric numbers that greeted his ascension last March were bound to drop, but they’ve now reached a critical point. Steady them (or improve them) over the next year, and Paterson will make the primary waters uninviting (to say the least) for Cuomo; but fail to do so, and a Cuomo challenge becomes almost inevitable.

The problem for Paterson is that a perception of general incompetence is taking hold, within the media and among the general public. His bungling of the Senate appointment process (voters seem to approve of the Gillibrand choice, just not the circus that preceded it) may have cemented this for many voters. As the economy worsens and he tackles what will surely be a brutal budget process, lack of confidence in Paterson is likely to grow, not shrink.

Cuomo’s mere presence adds another wrinkle. With his suddenly impressive poll numbers, he doesn’t need to lift a finger for the rest of this year: Any Democratic player in the state who is worried about Paterson’s ability to hold the office in 2010 (or offended by one of his moves as governor) will have a ready-made alternative in Cuomo. The Anyone But Paterson constituency won’t be split; it already has a candidate around whom it can unite.

Here, a parallel can be drawn to New Jersey in the spring of 2004, a year before then-Governor Jim McGreevey was to stand for re-election. His standing, much like Paterson’s, seemed to be in terminal decline; a series of scandals and missteps had called his basic management skills into question, and his approval rating might crack 45 percent in a good week. Republicans dreamed of facing him in 2005.

At the same time, then-Senator Jon Corzine made it clear (through unnamed leaks to the press – never through his own words) that he wouldn’t mind being governor and that he’d be willing to challenge McGreevey in ’05 if the party wanted him to. It was an awkward spectacle, not too different from the current Paterson/Cuomo dance: In public, McGreevey would praise Corzine and Corzine would praise McGreevey. In private, their aides plotted against each other. But the momentum was clearly with Corzine, and the final decision would be an easy one: If McGreevey didn’t turn around his poll number by the end of 2004, Corzine would run – and, almost certainly, win.

Of course, thanks to a certain Golan Cipel, it never came to that, and McGreevey fell on his own sword ten months before the June 2005 Democratic primary – which Corzine ran in, unopposed. Cuomo is now hewing to the Corzine model, calculating that, when the time comes, the necessary support will be there for him – provided the current governor continues to struggle.

Still, this doesn’t mean that Paterson blundered in not just sending Cuomo to the Senate last week. Again, consider the McGreevey example: If Corzine hadn’t been waiting in the wings (and if Cipel had never stepped forward), someone else (like South Jersey Congressman Rob Andrews) would have challenged him in ’05. And if McGreevey had survived that somehow, he would have faced the very real prospect of losing to the G.O.P. nominee in the fall.

 In other words, Jon Corzine was a symptom of Jim McGreevey’s serious political problems in 2004 – in the same way that Andrew Cuomo is now a symptom, and not a source, of David Paterson’s troubles today.

Murphy is generally one of the good guys in New Jersey politics, but apparently he's had quite a change of heart when it comes to Andrews.

"Rob has the vision, the energy and the determination to defeat the Republican candidate in November and to go on to become one of our state's truly great senators," Murphy said in the press release announcing his appointment as chairman today.

But this is what Murphy thought of Andrews back in '97, when they both vied with Jim McGreevey for the gubernatorial nomination.

Arguably, Murphy's ads were the most memorable product of that campaign (he was "the man in the van with the plan" in another spot, which showed him driving around the state surveying various trouble spots). Andrews, then a fourth-term congressman, entered that primary as the overwhelming favorite, with McGreevey penciled in for a distant second. Murphy, who registered at three percent in the first poll taken, surged into contention thanks to his ads (and general disgust with the bush-league bickering between the two front-runners), and -- briefly -- appeared within striking distance of a monumental upset. But in the June '97 primary, McGreevey edged out Andrews, 39 to 37 percent, with Murphy pulling 23 percent. By virtue of this stronger-than-expected showing, Murphy was considered a future statewide prospect, but -- thanks in no small part to the boss system that governs New Jersey politics and largely prevents competitive primaries -- another opportunity never presented itself.

Here is former NJ Governor Jim McGreevey about to sign a copy of his book after speaking to the Stonewall Democrats at the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Community Center in Manhattan yesterday.

Now that he's out of office with no plans to return, I asked him what he thought of the Democratic gains in Albany and Washington and what he thought the impact would be on the push to legalize gay marriage.

"I think it will happen in New York," he said. "And it will be on a priority list. I mean, there are a number of other challenges that are clearly eminent and pressing but I think it will happen."

On the federal level: "In Congress, I don't see it happening. I think there will be a number of employment anti-discrimination bills are passed that are very important."

He also said, "I think the employment discrimination and the federal anti-bullying legislation and also certain tax legislation I see as being critical."

When someone in the crowd of about 50 people asked about the legitimacy of outing closeted elected officials who actively work against gay rights -- as McGreevey did when he opposed same-sex marriage -- the former governor told the crowd it would be more effective to "go and talk to those officials who are closeted. Tell them that you are going to survive the other side of the divide."

There's more from McGreevey here [audio].

Dept. of Estimates: A reader who was at the event said that according to the group's sign-in sheet, there were 150 people in attendance.

-- Azi Paybarah

And the way the story goes from there, he moved on to clean up his personal life. Others fixed New Jersey.

The state budget was hopelessly out of balance. His political and ideological allies, frustrated by three years of vacillation on environmental issues, ethics legislation and spending priorities, had turned on him.

And most seriously, his administration was starting to give off the distinct whiff of ethical rot.

The governor had only shortly before been caught on tape uttering the word “Machiavelli” to a constituent. (He professes philosophical leanings toward Kant and the author of 7 Habits of Highly Effective People in his new book, but in this context Machiavelli was considered—at least by federal prosecutors—to be a code word in an illicit fund-raising scheme.)

And, most spectacularly, at least until the famous “Gay American” speech, Mr. McGreevey’s chief fund-raiser and financial patron, real-estate magnate Charles Kushner, had just been charged with interfering in a federal investigation into campaign-finance violations.

You could well ask whether the public is ready to relive these political failures as though they had all been a journey of personal development for Mr. McGreevey. ReganBooks seemed ready to take the chance when they shipped the former governor’s tell-all, The Confession, to bookstores on Sept. 19.

It’s worked before: Mr. McGreevey’s resignation announcement changed the subject entirely. It was all unprecedented and, at least in a rubbernecking kind of way, impossible to ignore.

Two years later, this tactic has been dressed in hardcover, and the journeys of personal discovery rendered a little—just a little, mind you—more vivid.

The passages in the book that deal with his affair with Golan Cipel—an Israeli national whom Mr. McGreevey appointed as New Jersey’s homeland-security advisor—attracted the intended level of attention from the national media during the publicity campaign for the book over the last week.

The centrality of the juicy stuff in Mr. McGreevey’s narrative is all justified, on his terms: His double existence as a closeted gay man was the very thing that allowed him to achieve his outsized career goals.

“Ironically,” he writes, “the dividing experience of my sexuality helped me thrive in that environment. As I climbed the electoral ladder—from state assemblyman to mayor of Woodbridge and finally to governor of New Jersey—political compromises came easy to me because I’d learned how to keep a part of myself innocent of them. I kept a steel wall around my moral and sexual instincts—protecting them, I thought, from the threats of the real world. This gave me a tremendous advantage in politics, if not in my soul.”

But reading The Confession—even the juicy stuff—is a little bit like sitting through one of Mr. McGreevey’s gubernatorial press conferences. Behind the slick packaging, it’s fairly mundane stuff.

Kissing Mr. Cipel for the first time, we’re told, sent the governor “through the roof.”

The description of his first homosexual experience, transacted at a YMCA, finds him and another man “standing in waist-deep water totally naked. Our excitement carried us even further. And when we were through …. ”

The book is, in fact, so candid as to raise doubts as to whether this could possibly have been the book that Mr. McGreevey—who always saw himself as a genuine policy wonk and a born public servant—actually set out to write.

After all, Mr. McGreevey’s initial attempts to ease his way back into public life after his departure from office were humble and seemingly well-intentioned.

After he left office, several reporters bumped into Mr. McGreevey at a church in Newark. He had shown up, unannounced, to dish out food on a soup line at Christmas, looking very small and—other than the giveaway presence of a recognizable political ally standing next to him—very anonymous.

Some time afterwards, Mr. McGreevey’s associates began talking about how he was planning to use his experience in government to serve some useful public role, perhaps as an anti-poverty advocate or a specialist on education reform.

So how to explain this book? It was always said of Mr. McGreevey in the halls of Trenton that he was the sort of politician who would agree completely and enthusiastically with whoever he had spoken to last.

In this case, one suspects, that person was his buzz-hungry publisher Judith Regan, who was no doubt very clear about her determination to reap a suitable monetary return on the author’s reported six-figure advance.

Beyond that, though, The Confession illustrates another of Mr. McGreevey’s dominant characteristics: an inability to understand how his actions are viewed by others.

It is perhaps fitting that after Mr. McGreevey kicked off his publicity tour for The Confession by talking on Oprah about his torrid affair with Mr. Cipel, the storyline that emerged from it—in The New York Times and elsewhere—was not that he had discovered his true sexual orientation, but that he had admitted, without any obvious remorse, to initiating the tryst as his wife was recovering in the hospital from the Caesarean delivery of their daughter.

In that same vein, Mr. McGreevey somehow expects the public to accept at face value the following passage, excerpted on the back cover:

“History books will all say that I resigned in disgrace. That misses the point entirely. Resigning was the single most important thing I have ever done. I’d rejected a political solution to my troubles and took the more painful route: penance and atonement, the way to grace.”

The problem is that Mr. McGreevey did resign in disgrace—to say so doesn’t miss the point at all. Putting aside everything else, the problem with Mr. Cipel wasn’t that Mr. McGreevey had fallen in love with him, but that he had appointed him—without qualifications or even U.S. citizenship—to a public post as the state’s homeland-security advisor.

And Mr. McGreevey certainly didn’t “reject” a political solution: Mr. Cipel was threatening to go public with news of their affair and his administration was in tatters. Resigning was, in and of itself, a supremely political solution.

Still, the way Mr. McGreevey actually ended his career in politics took some guts. Self-serving though it may have been, his confessional announcement to the world on Aug. 12, 2004, was an uncharacteristically courageous act.

The repeat performance—this book—is not.

And for good reason: Since 1972, only two Republicans—Tom Kean Sr. and Christine Todd Whitman, each elected and re-elected governor—have won statewide elections in New Jersey, and only once did their victory margin exceed one percentage point.

But cockiness also explains the predicament that Garden State Democrats now face: Six weeks before what figures to be the most Democrat-friendly midterm election in a generation, it is very possible—if not probable—that they will squander what should have been one of their party’s safest Senate seats.

Through scandals that would have killed off an ordinary state party, New Jersey’s Democrats thrived this decade, growing more confident with each win that they’d found a recipe for immunity. But now there is fear that they overreached and, in 2006, nominated the one man to whom their misdeeds will actually stick.

The national implications couldn’t be more dire: If Robert Menendez, New Jersey’s appointed Democratic incumbent, fails to hold off Republican Tom Kean Jr., Euclid himself couldn’t devise a majority-producing formula for the Democrats.

For now, the Menendez-Kean race is essentially a tie, something of an achievement in its own right for New Jersey’s G.O.P., which typically enjoys all the September success of the Tampa Bay Devil Rays. What’s more, the most recent polls haven’t even measured the impact of a recently revealed federal criminal investigation of Mr. Menendez, the consequences of which Democrats privately describe with words ranging from “pretty bad” to “fatal.”

That quiet angst, though, isn’t entirely owed to the investigation itself, which was launched by U.S. Attorney Christopher J. Christie two weeks ago. It has more to do with context. Just consider what else is in the news in New Jersey these days.

There’s Jim McGreevey, some 22 months after skipping town with federal investigations into his gubernatorial administration swirling, who barged back into our lives last week to let us know that the sexual affair with the unqualified Israeli sailor he appointed as his state’s homeland-security advisor actually began while Mrs. McGreevey lay in a hospital bed clutching the couple’s newborn daughter. If that’s not enough, Golan Cipel, Mr. McGreevey’s supposed romantic partner, has himself re-emerged—to declare that the governor had actually liquored him up with Jägermeister and tried to rape him.

There’s also John Lynch, the onetime New Jersey Senate president (and Mr. McGreevey’s political godfather), whose plea agreement on federal corruption charges landed on the front page of last Friday’s Star-Ledger—right next to the news that Mr. McGreevey had been smitten with Mr. Cipel “from the first kiss.”

And then there’s this week’s report from a federal monitor essentially charging Wayne Bryant, a powerful state senator and loyal cog in the feared Camden County Democratic Committee, with shaking down administrators at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey to secure a no-show job for himself.

And those are just the biggies.

It may be hard for someone in, say, Kansas to understand this, but this is far from the first time that New Jersey Democrats have handed Republicans political ammunition this potent. But it has never mattered—until now.

In last year’s governor’s race, Republicans tied Jon Corzine, through his obscene personal campaign contributions and politically reckless business dealings, to a host of unseemly—and even indicted—characters. But Mr. Corzine won by 10 points: Few voters believed that the former Goldman Sachs C.E.O. would dirty himself doing business with ward-heelers.

The same goes for 2002, when Democrats switched a wheezing, wounded Robert Torricelli out of a Senate re-election race that he was about to lose, instead coasting home with the innocuous Frank Lautenberg.

Mr. Menendez may not be so lucky.

The public, even before word surfaced that U.S. Attorney Christopher J. Christie was probing his past role as a Union City landlord, already seemed inclined to tie Mr. Menendez to the sins of his party. The Senator has since intimated that Mr. Christie, a G.O.P.-appointed prosecutor, is motivated by politics and swears that the matter is overblown. It may well be.

But Mr. Menendez was always playing a risky game, betting that he—and, more importantly, New Jersey’s voters—had heard the last of some of the uglier chapters from his days as Hudson County’s Democratic boss.

Like earlier this decade, when he used his fierce and unforgiving muscle to paralyze the government of Jersey City. And why? To teach a lesson to the mayor, a man named Glenn Cunningham, who had run afoul of Mr. Menendez.

Tragically, Mr. Cunningham died two years ago. The city shut down for his funeral, and some 4,000 residents made their way to the armory for the ceremony. Mr. Menendez was barred from coming anywhere near it. But who delivered a eulogy? Why, Chris Christie. Of course.

Maybe, for both New Jersey Democrats and Mr. Menendez, the old saw is true: What goes around, comes around.

And for good reason: Since 1972, only two Republicans—Tom Kean Sr. and Christine Todd Whitman, each elected and re-elected governor—have won statewide elections in New Jersey, and only once did their victory margin exceed one percentage point.

But cockiness also explains the predicament that Garden State Democrats now face: Six weeks before what figures to be the most Democrat-friendly midterm election in a generation, it is very possible—if not probable—that they will squander what should have been one of their party’s safest Senate seats.

Through scandals that would have killed off an ordinary state party, New Jersey’s Democrats thrived this decade, growing more confident with each win that they’d found a recipe for immunity. But now there is fear that they overreached and, in 2006, nominated the one man to whom their misdeeds will actually stick.

The national implications couldn’t be more dire: If Robert Menendez, New Jersey’s appointed Democratic incumbent, fails to hold off Republican Tom Kean Jr., Euclid himself couldn’t devise a majority-producing formula for the Democrats.

For now, the Menendez-Kean race is essentially a tie, something of an achievement in its own right for New Jersey’s G.O.P., which typically enjoys all the September success of the Tampa Bay Devil Rays. What’s more, the most recent polls haven’t even measured the impact of a recently revealed federal criminal investigation of Mr. Menendez, the consequences of which Democrats privately describe with words ranging from “pretty bad” to “fatal.”

That quiet angst, though, isn’t entirely owed to the investigation itself, which was launched by U.S. Attorney Christopher J. Christie two weeks ago. It has more to do with context. Just consider what else is in the news in New Jersey these days.

There’s Jim McGreevey, some 22 months after skipping town with federal investigations into his gubernatorial administration swirling, who barged back into our lives last week to let us know that the sexual affair with the unqualified Israeli sailor he appointed as his state’s homeland-security advisor actually began while Mrs. McGreevey lay in a hospital bed clutching the couple’s newborn daughter. If that’s not enough, Golan Cipel, Mr. McGreevey’s supposed romantic partner, has himself re-emerged—to declare that the governor had actually liquored him up with Jägermeister and tried to rape him.

There’s also John Lynch, the onetime New Jersey Senate president (and Mr. McGreevey’s political godfather), whose plea agreement on federal corruption charges landed on the front page of last Friday’s Star-Ledger—right next to the news that Mr. McGreevey had been smitten with Mr. Cipel “from the first kiss.”

And then there’s this week’s report from a federal monitor essentially charging Wayne Bryant, a powerful state senator and loyal cog in the feared Camden County Democratic Committee, with shaking down administrators at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey to secure a no-show job for himself.

And those are just the biggies.

It may be hard for someone in, say, Kansas to understand this, but this is far from the first time that New Jersey Democrats have handed Republicans political ammunition this potent. But it has never mattered—until now.

In last year’s governor’s race, Republicans tied Jon Corzine, through his obscene personal campaign contributions and politically reckless business dealings, to a host of unseemly—and even indicted—characters. But Mr. Corzine won by 10 points: Few voters believed that the former Goldman Sachs C.E.O. would dirty himself doing business with ward-heelers.

The same goes for 2002, when Democrats switched a wheezing, wounded Robert Torricelli out of a Senate re-election race that he was about to lose, instead coasting home with the innocuous Frank Lautenberg.

Mr. Menendez may not be so lucky.

The public, even before word surfaced that U.S. Attorney Christopher J. Christie was probing his past role as a Union City landlord, already seemed inclined to tie Mr. Menendez to the sins of his party. The Senator has since intimated that Mr. Christie, a G.O.P.-appointed prosecutor, is motivated by politics and swears that the matter is overblown. It may well be.

But Mr. Menendez was always playing a risky game, betting that he—and, more importantly, New Jersey’s voters—had heard the last of some of the uglier chapters from his days as Hudson County’s Democratic boss.

Like earlier this decade, when he used his fierce and unforgiving muscle to paralyze the government of Jersey City. And why? To teach a lesson to the mayor, a man named Glenn Cunningham, who had run afoul of Mr. Menendez.

Tragically, Mr. Cunningham died two years ago. The city shut down for his funeral, and some 4,000 residents made their way to the armory for the ceremony. Mr. Menendez was barred from coming anywhere near it. But who delivered a eulogy? Why, Chris Christie. Of course.

Maybe, for both New Jersey Democrats and Mr. Menendez, the old saw is true: What goes around, comes around.

And the way the story goes from there, he moved on to clean up his personal life. Others fixed New Jersey.

The state budget was hopelessly out of balance. His political and ideological allies, frustrated by three years of vacillation on environmental issues, ethics legislation and spending priorities, had turned on him.

And most seriously, his administration was starting to give off the distinct whiff of ethical rot.

The governor had only shortly before been caught on tape uttering the word “Machiavelli” to a constituent. (He professes philosophical leanings toward Kant and the author of 7 Habits of Highly Effective People in his new book, but in this context Machiavelli was considered—at least by federal prosecutors—to be a code word in an illicit fund-raising scheme.)

And, most spectacularly, at least until the famous “Gay American” speech, Mr. McGreevey’s chief fund-raiser and financial patron, real-estate magnate Charles Kushner, had just been charged with interfering in a federal investigation into campaign-finance violations.

You could well ask whether the public is ready to relive these political failures as though they had all been a journey of personal development for Mr. McGreevey. ReganBooks seemed ready to take the chance when they shipped the former governor’s tell-all, The Confession, to bookstores on Sept. 19.

It’s worked before: Mr. McGreevey’s resignation announcement changed the subject entirely. It was all unprecedented and, at least in a rubbernecking kind of way, impossible to ignore.

Two years later, this tactic has been dressed in hardcover, and the journeys of personal discovery rendered a little—just a little, mind you—more vivid.

The passages in the book that deal with his affair with Golan Cipel—an Israeli national whom Mr. McGreevey appointed as New Jersey’s homeland-security advisor—attracted the intended level of attention from the national media during the publicity campaign for the book over the last week.

The centrality of the juicy stuff in Mr. McGreevey’s narrative is all justified, on his terms: His double existence as a closeted gay man was the very thing that allowed him to achieve his outsized career goals.

“Ironically,” he writes, “the dividing experience of my sexuality helped me thrive in that environment. As I climbed the electoral ladder—from state assemblyman to mayor of Woodbridge and finally to governor of New Jersey—political compromises came easy to me because I’d learned how to keep a part of myself innocent of them. I kept a steel wall around my moral and sexual instincts—protecting them, I thought, from the threats of the real world. This gave me a tremendous advantage in politics, if not in my soul.”

But reading The Confession—even the juicy stuff—is a little bit like sitting through one of Mr. McGreevey’s gubernatorial press conferences. Behind the slick packaging, it’s fairly mundane stuff.

Kissing Mr. Cipel for the first time, we’re told, sent the governor “through the roof.”

The description of his first homosexual experience, transacted at a YMCA, finds him and another man “standing in waist-deep water totally naked. Our excitement carried us even further. And when we were through …. ”

The book is, in fact, so candid as to raise doubts as to whether this could possibly have been the book that Mr. McGreevey—who always saw himself as a genuine policy wonk and a born public servant—actually set out to write.

After all, Mr. McGreevey’s initial attempts to ease his way back into public life after his departure from office were humble and seemingly well-intentioned.

After he left office, several reporters bumped into Mr. McGreevey at a church in Newark. He had shown up, unannounced, to dish out food on a soup line at Christmas, looking very small and—other than the giveaway presence of a recognizable political ally standing next to him—very anonymous.

Some time afterwards, Mr. McGreevey’s associates began talking about how he was planning to use his experience in government to serve some useful public role, perhaps as an anti-poverty advocate or a specialist on education reform.

So how to explain this book? It was always said of Mr. McGreevey in the halls of Trenton that he was the sort of politician who would agree completely and enthusiastically with whoever he had spoken to last.

In this case, one suspects, that person was his buzz-hungry publisher Judith Regan, who was no doubt very clear about her determination to reap a suitable monetary return on the author’s reported six-figure advance.

Beyond that, though, The Confession illustrates another of Mr. McGreevey’s dominant characteristics: an inability to understand how his actions are viewed by others.

It is perhaps fitting that after Mr. McGreevey kicked off his publicity tour for The Confession by talking on Oprah about his torrid affair with Mr. Cipel, the storyline that emerged from it—in The New York Times and elsewhere—was not that he had discovered his true sexual orientation, but that he had admitted, without any obvious remorse, to initiating the tryst as his wife was recovering in the hospital from the Caesarean delivery of their daughter.

In that same vein, Mr. McGreevey somehow expects the public to accept at face value the following passage, excerpted on the back cover:

“History books will all say that I resigned in disgrace. That misses the point entirely. Resigning was the single most important thing I have ever done. I’d rejected a political solution to my troubles and took the more painful route: penance and atonement, the way to grace.”

The problem is that Mr. McGreevey did resign in disgrace—to say so doesn’t miss the point at all. Putting aside everything else, the problem with Mr. Cipel wasn’t that Mr. McGreevey had fallen in love with him, but that he had appointed him—without qualifications or even U.S. citizenship—to a public post as the state’s homeland-security advisor.

And Mr. McGreevey certainly didn’t “reject” a political solution: Mr. Cipel was threatening to go public with news of their affair and his administration was in tatters. Resigning was, in and of itself, a supremely political solution.

Still, the way Mr. McGreevey actually ended his career in politics took some guts. Self-serving though it may have been, his confessional announcement to the world on Aug. 12, 2004, was an uncharacteristically courageous act.

The repeat performance—this book—is not.

-- Azi Paybarah

(via Gawker)