Governor X’s looming sex scandal

Mark Sanford is trying to win his wife’s forgiveness, said George Rush and Joanna Malloy in the New York Daily News, but another married governor could be headed toward “fresh hell.” A “high-end escort” who's already said she had rough sex with then–New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer is claiming that she also had three sex “dates” with another of our “most prominent governors”—call him Gov. X—whose wife is “prominent in her own right.”

This story has to be “prompting a variety of quiet phone calls” among some governors' staff, said Moe Lane in RedState. As for the rest of us, the speculation begins. “Fortunately, there’s a dearth of male Republican governors of states within reasonable driving distance of NYC.”

Any Democratic governor “would likely have been brought down right alongside Eliot Spitzer,” said Teddy Partridge in Firedoglake. Whoever Gov. X is was in office in 2006, and has a “media-saavy-enough” staff to stop the Daily News from “printing his name,” even though it got a “carefully parsed denial” from his office.

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“Let’s speculate recklessly!” said Gawker. Based on the criteria from the Daily News story, the most likely governors are, in order, Arnold Schwarzenegger (R, Calif), Ed Rendell (D, Pa), Jim Gibbons (R, Nev.), and Deval Patrick (D, Mass). We’d throw in Tim Pawlenty (R, Minn.), too, but only because he’s a potential 2012 GOP candidate.