The unfolding story of New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer has unfolded like a Greek tragedy. As with the morality tales of ancient Greece, this story has an important lesson for us all -- character is indispensible to leadership.

The American people may be confused about this at times, especially when dealing with actual cases of scandal and the misbehavior of elected leaders. We now know that presidents have committed adultery and engaged in illicit sex, ranging from Franklin Roosevelt to Bill Clinton. Harvard Professor Alan Dershowitz has defended Spitzer (his former research assistant) and called for him to remain in office, reminding us that President John F. Kennedy was acting like an "adolescent boy" at night with sexual promiscuity while saving the world from disaster during the Cuban Missile Crisis by day.

The problem with that is the fact that Americans were not aware of President Kennedy's moral lapses at the time, and we simply do not know if he could have survived that knowledge. I seriously doubt that he could have continued in office. I also doubt that most Americans would think that Kennedy could have maintained his leadership credibility under those circumstances.

President Bill Clinton did survive the Monica Lewinsky crisis, but not without great cost to his presidency and his legacy. Can anyone estimate the cost of that scandal to the entire nation?

As for Gov. Spitzer, the reality is that the unfolding story grew uglier and uglier by the hour. It involves serious legal questions as well as the obvious moral issues. The entire nation felt such grief for his family and his wife, and a man grew smaller and smaller in the public eye. By mid-week, the question of his leaving office was when, not if, and was obvious to almost all.

Americans know that leaders are human. The public elected President Grover Cleveland to office in 1884, even as he acknowledged that he was the likely father of a child born out of wedlock. Voters judged him by his long record of public service and moral recovery. Franklin Roosevelt's place in the top rankings of most powerful U.S. presidents is secure -- even with the knowledge of his affair with Lucy Mercer.

But the case of Eliot Spitzer reminds us all that the public does have a sense that personal morality is tied to public leadership -- indeed that private morality and public morality cannot be on two completely different tracks. Eliot Spitzer, involved in a scandalous story of prostitution and related details, far exceeded the generous boundaries of the public's tolerance for the failures of elected leaders.

Christians can never look at these issues as the merely political, however. In a biblical perspective, this is yet another grim and sobering reminder that all are sinners, and that sin will work its corrosive way into moral collapse, but for the restraining grace of God, and His saving grace through Jesus Christ our Lord.