I don’t now about you, but I’ve found the Republican race a bit of a disappointment until now. Sure, there was the enjoyment of mud-wrestling “debates,” the spectacle of Trump-derangement syndrome, but where was the sex scandal?

And when we get the sex scandal, it’s about Ted Cruz!

Still, beggars can’t be choosers. The scandal, such as it was, has been floating around for a least six months. That’s when a reporter (not from the Spectator) called to ask if I knew anyone who could confirm the story. (As if I’m supposed to know this stuff.) I told him I didn’t and that the people I knew wouldn’t want to touch it, even if they knew something about it.

Now the story has gone public, thanks to a muck-raking journal that as it happened also outed John Edwards. And everyone is wondering whether the story is true.

Except me. Because I don’t much care if it’s true. Given Heidi, I wouldn’t blame Ted. After all, she apparently refuses to live with him. And given Ted, I wouldn’t blame Heidi.

Novelists will sometimes mention some little incident that doesn’t really move the story line, but which nonetheless matters. The little incident that sticks in my mind is the story that she once ran out of the house and was found on the side of the highway by the police, who thought her suicidal. What sticks in my mind is that Ted hadn’t followed her.

From that story I have taken a picture of a mind utterly concentrated in self and entirely devoid of empathy. Which seems to be how his colleagues have found him, everywhere he went.

But I don’t say the story is entirely without interest. First, there are the Trump haters. A Cruz supporter flashes pictures of Melania, and they hate Trump. A story emerges about Cruz’s affairs, and they hate Trump. The story came from Rubio people, but they hate Trump. This is getting to be a bore.

The second part of the story came from the reporter who called me six months back. He told me that Cruz is privately irreligious, that he mocks his Evangelical supporters. I haven’t any reason to think this true, but I have found it sick-making to see pictures of him laying hands on supporters, or to listen to a sanctimonious Mitt Romney condemn Trump.

From the pious hypocrites, from the merchants of bile, from a Republican Party in its death agony, Lord have mercy.