As with the case of David Vitter, despite the total media frenzy over the Eliot Spitzer story, I find it difficult to say anything - at least anything of value - about it. Unfortunately, we've seen this story play out many times before and we all know how it ends.

The only things left to learn are the lurid details, and while they may titillate and appeal to our voyeuristic instincts, they are really beside the main point of the story which is that with his actions Spitzer violated the public trust in his position of Governor of New York. So, as Forrest Gump might say, "that's all I have to say about that."

But here's what others are saying on editorial pages around the country. Of the six major papers in the New York area, three of them called for Spitzer's resignation this morning.

The The New York Times slammed Spitzer but came up just short of calling for him to step down:

His short, arrogant statement simply was not enough, not from the Sheriff of Wall Street, not from the self-appointed Mr. Clean who went to Albany promising a new and better day. [snip]

Mr. Spitzer did not seem to understand on Monday what he owed the public - a strong argument for why he should be trusted again. The longer he hesitates, it becomes a harder case to make.

As you might expect, the New York Post did not mince words:

In the days following his landslide election victory, Eliot Spitzer made a promise to the people of New York: "We believe it is important to set a tone, to send a message and to lead by example."

Exactly.

A governor who is caught on tape negotiating a $4,300 deal for a call girl named "Kristen" can hardly lead by example.

Nor can he set the tone needed "to do the right thing for the people of New York."

Eliot Spitzer owes his wife and family an apology - but he owes the people of New York a great deal more.

His resignation. Now.

Nor did the New York Daily News:

Eliot Spitzer brought his once-promising governorship to a crashing end with a display of recklessness and hypocrisy of such magnitude that you had to question his sanity.

Three words to the man: Just get out.

Spitzer's patronage of a high-priced prostitution service drained what was left of his moral authority, and his blithe willingness to order up a hooker by telephone revealed an abysmal and disqualifying lack of judgment.

With regret, we must say, Spitzer proved an unworthy heir to the office once held by the likes by Teddy Roosevelt, Al Smith, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Herbert Lehman and Thomas Dewey.

Newsday voiced the kind of shock that characterized much of the coverage of the story yesterday:

What a stunner. The last time Eliot Spitzer and "prostitution ring" were mentioned in the same sentence, the reformist governor was enacting a new felony statute to punish human trafficking. Before that, it was Spitzer the crusading attorney general, busting call girl businesses on Staten Island.

And now all the promise that rested on this leader with the wide vocabulary and the pugnacious jaw comes to this: a tawdry rendezvous - in fact, probably many of them - with a hooker, this time at Washington's Mayflower Hotel.

Of course, the governor has to resign. Fifteen months ago, he was the chief legal officer of the state. Hiring a call girl was not only against the law, but procuring her to cross state lines turned the $4,300 evening into a federal crime. Spitzer, 48, is either viciously self-destructive or pathologically arrogant, believing he wouldn't be caught.

And in perhaps the biggest surprise, the conservative New York Sun, often Spitzer's harshest critic, struck a note of melancholy:

We, however, find ourselves shorn of schadenfreude. It is true that when Mr. Spitzer was attorney general, we were among his harshest critics. And it is true that these columns, alone among the dailies in this city, endorsed Mr. Spitzer's Republican opponent, John Faso, for governor. We saw Mr. Faso as the man of principle in the election. But when the voters had spoken, and by such an astonishing margin as was gained by Mr. Spitzer, we embraced, albeit with reservations, the hope of so many New Yorkers that Mr. Spitzer had the personality to start things changing from day one. Our hostility to his program was never personal. When, on January 31, he joined our editorial board for dinner, what he said was off the record. But what we said was that our criticism didn't mean that we were rooting for his failure. We wanted to see him succeed as governor.

It's difficult - not impossible, but difficult - to see now how that can happen. In part we sense an element in which the public is just fed up with it all. Fed up with married, Ivy League-educated Democratic politicians with law degrees like President Clinton and Governor Spitzer and Governor McGreevey, who seem to equate power with license in a way that not only causes excruciating hurt to their own families but erodes the standing of our government itself. It is true that plenty of public servants had extramarital affairs, from Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson to President Kennedy. But - and we recognize the irony - the more liberal our society has become the greater the value that is attached to probity.

The Wall Street Journal didn't call for Spitzer's resignation, but there is clearly no love between the two as the Journal takes a longer view of Spitzer's tenure in office:

One might call it Shakespearian if there were a shred of nobleness in the story of Eliot Spitzer's fall. There is none. Governor Spitzer, who made his career by specializing in not just the prosecution, but the ruin, of other men, is himself almost certainly ruined. [snip}

There really is nothing very satisfying about the rough justice being meted out to Eliot Spitzer. He came to embody a system that revels in the entertainment value of roguish figures who rise to power by destroying the careers of others, many of them innocent. Better still, when the targets are as presumably unsympathetic as Wall Street bankers and brokers.

Acts of crime deserve prosecution by the state. The people, in turn, deserve prosecutors and officials who understand the difference between the needs of the public good and the needs of unrestrained personalities who are given the honor of high office.