Radar Online is wondering how a secret that wasn't a secret at all managed to remain a secret until shortly before the election:

The real wonder of the Mark Foley scandal may be how it stayed under wraps for so long. As the story continued to pick up momentum yesterday, Capitol Hill journalists came out of the woodwork to declare that they, too, knew that the Florida Republican had a reputation for coming on to teenage Congressional pages. One D.C. reporter recounted getting a number of email printouts from a source in May--the same messages that eventually brought about Foley's downfall after they turned up last week on an anonymous blog called Stop Sex Predators. The reporter said she found the emails "inappropriate and a little bit creepy," but not newsworthy enough to get her editor's support for a full-blown investigation.

"He said, 'Do some reporting, see what you can get, but I'm not into this,'" she recalls. Part of the problem was that the page's name and his responses were redacted from the printout, making it difficult to determine his identity or assess to what extent he had been an active participant in the flirtation rather than a passive victim.

Of course, notes the reporter, evidence of this particular Congressman hitting on a teenage boy was not as shocking to a Washington insider as one might expect. "He's always had a reputation of hitting on young guys--legal-age young guys, that is," she says. "It seemed believable to me."

This reporter wasn't the only one in Washington who knew about Foley's activities but didn't think them worthy of column inches. Several weeks after getting the printouts from her source, she says, a colleague from a major national news organization passed her another set of copies, telling her he couldn't write about them for his outlet. "I said, 'I've already got the emails, and from what I know, other people have them, too,'" she says.

"At first, not knowing who it was, it didn't overtly shock me. It's the Internet, it's the mid-90s. I'm a teenage guy. Things like that are less than unnormal. You get stuff like that all the time."

"Upon figuring out several weeks later that it was Congressman Foley, I was kind of taken aback by the whole situation. But it didn't overtly surprise me because there had been rumors about Congressman Foley, of which the majority of my class were aware of during my tenure in DC."

"There was a moniker by which we described Foley--FFF. It stood for Foley the fag from Florida."

From what I know about the way Washington works, Foley's interests had to be common Washington knowledge for years.

By both parties.

Is it unreasonable to ask whether this is in fact the great big October "surprise" that everyone is claiming it is?

I'm wondering.

And while I am trying to be fair, the conclusion is inescapable that both parties knew all along. I have to ask: is it possible that the general public has simply been had? Can such things be? Why the national morality pageant just before the election?

Something doesn't make sense.