On day three, now that most of the dust--and, hopefully, most of the sordid details--have settled in the Eliot Spitzer debacle, The Wall Street Journal's Daniel Henninger makes an interesting point: culturally, we are Spitzer...and Spitzer is us.

Somewhere along the line in our culture, we all became complicit in elevating and celebrating that which is outsized, not normal -- disproportionate. Eliot Spitzer was a prosecutor on steroids. His audience cheered, until he got caught. Then, quite naturally, it leered.

In a more restricted, even straitlaced age, people had internal monitors. One was discretion. It had its uses. Still does. Now we live in a less hinged age. We have unrestrained personalities with unrestrained behavior. Want to see one? Turn on your TV. Check the prose on the Web. No surprise that some people, like Client 9, hit the wall.

The over-the-top is all over the place--the once-august Atlantic Monthly, for instance, features a tired-looking Britney Spears on its April cover, and Spitzer's escort, an aspiring singer, headlines Drudge--but politics, as Henninger points out, could be one of the more destructive arenas it could enter. He suspects that "there may be no going back to a more balanced time." We shall see.