Much of the scathing Senate Ethics Committee report released earlier this month accusing former senator John Ensign of violating campaign laws was based on more than 1,000 pages of potentially privileged emails that he willingly handed over for no apparent reason, according to Reuters.

The Senate Ethics Committee has uncovered extensive evidence that former Sen. John Ensign (R-NV) and others broke U.S. law by trying to cover up an affair Ensign had with a campaign aide, the wife of one of his top Senate staffers.

Sen. John Ensign, the evangelical Republican who's faced an ethics investigation ever since he banged the wife of one of his aides and then tried to keep the couple quiet by paying them off, is resigning. Last day: May 3!

Nevada Sen. John Ensign is expected to announce his retirement today, sparing himself a hellish Republican primary. His legacy includes banging his chief of staff's wife and then borrowing $96,000 in hush money from his elderly parents.

Senator John Ensign may be indicted for "structuring," a fancy term for inventing made-up financial transactions to avoid embarrassing disclosures, like paying your mistress $96,000 to go away, which is what John Ensign did.

Tonight on The Daily Show, Jon Stewart issued an equal opportunity slap on the wrist to members on both sides of the Congressional aisle for their party-driven, hypocritical responses to the sex scandals of colleagues. Inside, video of Stewart's remarks.

Is there a political sex scandal double standard? Do Republicans get off easier than Democrats? Steve Benen and Matt Yglesias think so. As does every other partisan in the world!

New emails tie John Ensign even closer to his cuckolded, hush-moneyed staffer.

They never learn, do they? Not to have sex with people you are not married to, that is. That is what they (elected officials) did not learn, in the 2000s. Who were they trying to have sex with? Literally everyone.

Were you hoping to see the David Letterman saga subside this week so we could all turn our attention to, say, more serious public sex scandals such as one that quite possibly involved breaking the law? It doesn't look like that's going to be happening. Following another day of over-the-top coverage (including a series of interviews by Gerald Shargel, the lawyer defending alleged extortionist Joe Halderman, Letterman will once again address the scandal on his show tonight and apologize to his wife and staff. [AP, ABC News, NYP]

You just have to admire the set on John Ensign. The C Street Republican who had his parents to pay $96,000 in hush money to his mistress is now saying that his affair broke no laws, unlike Bill Clinton's.

What a wonderful summer it has been, for fans of the dragged-out meltdowns of prominent Republican politicians! We should perhaps pause to recognize the contributions John Ensign, Mark Sanford, and Sarah Palin have made to our American language.

This John Ensign thing is becoming amazing. Earlier we learned that Ensign's buddy Sen. Tom Coburn, an OB/GYN, is citing doctor/patient privacy for refusing to talk about him, now we know that his parents "gifted" his mistress with $96,000.

Doug Hampton, the husband of John Ensign's mistress, says Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) urged Ensign to pay Hampton off to the tune of $1.2 million to make the whole mess go away. Now Coburn won't talk, claiming doctor-patient privilege.

Before Michael Jackson died, and before Mark Sanford disappeared to Argentina, a Senator named John Ensign admitted to an affair with a former staffer, who was married to another former staffer. And now we have his break-up letter to her.

We thought we'd read nothing worse today than Kathryn Jean Lopez's op-ed on John Ensign's affair. But then we read her NRO colleague Andy McCarthy on how Obama is totally an Islamist Fundamentalist!

Doug Hampton, the cuckolded husband of Sen. John Ensign's mistress, wrote a letter to Fox News five days before the story broke that Ensign had ruined his life and career. Fox never reported it, and called Hampton an extortionist.

John Ensign revealed that he had an affair with a married former staffer (her husband, another former staffer, tried to extort Ensign because of his shitty mortgage and Ensign got him two jobs)), and then all his interns quit.

Why did Republican Senator John Ensign's sexual dalliance with a married former staffer get revealed now? Because of subprime mortgages and the Nevada housing crisis!

John Ensign, a Republican senator from Nevada, has admitted cheating on his wife with a staffer. But it was a lady staffer, so big whoop.