Voters were “stunned” and also “dumbstruck,” said the AP. It was just a “bombshell,” this admission from the governor.

This was August 12, 2004. “You’re right,” said David Lee Miller on Fox News. “This is nothing less than a stunning announcement broadcast live.”

But who was stunned?

“Oh, you know, I don’t know that anybody was really surprised to find out that Jim McGreevey was gay,” Herb Jackson of The Record of Hackensack said on CNN that night.

Jeff Pillets wrote in the next day’s edition of The Record: “‘All of us knew it, the press knew it and the governor was forced to live this horrible lie,’ said one Democrat who worked closely with McGreevey.”

It didn’t help that McGreevey lied to an AP reporter who, that summer, finally just asked him if he was gay.

Nobody printed it anyway.

And now we have to know about the three-ways with Jim and Dina (who a friend describes as the woman with “the voice like a humping cat from Tenafly”) and that baby-fat-faced Rutgers student. Can anyone ever look at a plate of TGI Friday’s Sesame Jack Chicken Strips the same way again?

♦ ♦ ♦

News of state-capital filth trickles out in confused fits and starts. One of the jobs of Albany-based reporters might even be to protect us from knowing certain things.

But over the past week, the mangled rumors flew. People were asking: Which public official liked to get handsy in the back of a cab? Which one, if any, has a son by someone who is not his wife, a child who is nearly the same age as his son by his wife? Who had a girlfriend put on whose staff, where her job was essentially to lobby the girlfriend’s former flame?

Any crisis publicist will tell you that the only way to deal with these things, should they happen to apply to you, is to shove them out there yourself.

New York’s smart new governor, David Paterson, is the first—after the failings of McGreevey, Eliot Spitzer, Kwame Kilpatrick, that jokester Larry Craig and shall we go on?—to try it.

Sort of.

♦ ♦ ♦

Here’s something odd. Why did the Patersons submit to carefully conducted sit-downs with Juan Gonzalez of the New York Daily News, in which they each broke the news of an affair—when the new governor would then, fourteen and a half hours after that story was published, go on to announce affairs with a whole herd of other women?

There’s a public-relations strategy gone somehow off the rails there. For one thing, it pissed everyone off.

In the long and dark intervening hours between the Daily News story at 10 p.m. Monday and Paterson’s press conference at 12:30 p.m. Tuesday, some tried to say what they couldn’t quite say.

“Neither Paterson nor his wife identified the individuals with whom they cheated. This would, of course, become more of an issue if the woman with whom Paterson had an affair is or was on the state payroll,” Liz Benjamin wrote on the Daily News’ Daily Politics blog.

Oh, look, it turned out one of the women was.

“It was not clear if he had subsequent relationships outside his marriage,” Danny Hakim posted at The New York Times.

Oh, but he did.

So the full disclosure to the Daily News wasn’t actually a full disclosure. That made the next disclosure suspect. And the one after that?

A third would just be annoying. Scandal-time is like bullet-time. Picture this week’s New York magazine cover with Eliot Spitzer. Too late! A week after his hooker enthusiasms came out, no matter how poorly the revelation was handled by the governor—and it was handled very, very poorly—the story was already quite over.

♦ ♦ ♦

“I’ve known David his whole career,” said PR man Ken Sunshine late last week. Sunshine is also friendly with Eliot Spitzer. And officially, his firm doesn’t handle elected officials. “People think, frankly, I know more than I do,” he said.

“I think every public figure deserves a certain degree of privacy,” he said. “But it’s very, very different now than it used to be. And I don’t mean that nobody said F.D.R. was disabled, or Kennedy wasn’t sleeping around—we’re not going back to those days and I don’t think we should.”

He said: “Everybody knows that the lowest common denominator seems to be working at mainstream news outlets. Sex scandal sells. At all costs. When you have governors that are paying for hookers and presidents admitting to blow jobs in the Oval Office, you feed that. But you know. We’re supposed to, you know, examine David Paterson’s sex life just because he’s the incoming governor? I think it’s insane. And I think the public—I think it’s out of control and outrageous. I wish it would backfire on the media. I think there’s a fallacy between editors and producers—mainstream media’s going down the tubes anyway. Fewer people are watching network news—more sex, more sex, more scandal. Maybe I’m in the minority.”

♦ ♦ ♦

There are things reporters believe to be true, and then things that reporters can prove to be true, and then things that reporters will print.

There’s also something in between now.

In light of Eliot Spitzer’s crazy prostitute problems, reporters had both motive and opportunity—and maybe even a pass on being blacklisted—to ask questions about Paterson’s personal life.

Last week, at Paterson’s first news conference, he was asked if he’d ever patronized a prostitute. He answered with a joke: “Only the lobbyists.”

“I suspect the question will have to get asked again,” wrote Jay Jochnowitz, the state editor of Albany’s Times Union, on his blog.

Shortly after Jochnowitz wrote that, Errol Cockfield—formerly Spitzer’s press person, now Paterson’s—poked his head in the press office and said, “The answer’s no!” Jochnowitz had no idea what he was talking about, but figured it out pretty fast.

Aides, when asked by reporters how they planned to address the questions about Paterson’s personal life, said: honestly. (Points to them for choosing to answer the question asked, instead of the question clearly intended.)

That window was closing with this Monday’s triumphant swearing-in, rapturously received from the New York Post to NY1.

Did anyone have anything but rumors? Would it have been swept away into the horny mist that apparently cloaks Albany? (Have you been there? You’d sleep around, too, in lieu of stabbing yourself in the eye.)

But by then, Paterson had already been meeting with Juan Gonzalez.

♦ ♦ ♦

What’s the truth to the rumors about Paterson, I asked Jochnowitz on Friday night. Is he clean? Filthy?

“I will tell you the truth: I don’t know the truth, either,” he said. “My experience with Paterson has been on the former of that—squeaky clean, keeps himself out of trouble. … I haven’t seen anything that leads me to believe that we just jumped from one train wreck to another. Yet! Who knows? Ha! I have often told even my kids: Watch out who you pick for heroes, guys, other than your dad.

“Hopefully, we don’t have to go through the whole building,” he said. “We’ll just put a questionnaire on all the legislators’ desks.”