Do men see Mark Sanford in the mirror?

I'm tempted to assume that the staying power of the Sanford story is simply a function of its prurience. Sex scandals, after all, are much better for ratings than serious -- read "boring" -- events. It's also true that Sanford's lies take this saga beyond the realm of mere sexual impropriety and make it a genuine matter of political concern. (Nevada Sen. John Ensign, who confessed to an affair last week, has endured considerably less news coverage, perhaps because he at least had the good sense to keep his cellphone on during his dalliances.)

So what's left to say about the Sanford saga? Call me crazy, but amid all this finger-wagging, am I detecting just a little bit of -- gasp -- empathy? Is there something about Sanford's puppyish comportment, not to mention the fact that, unlike many adulterous politicos, he seems to be truly in love with his mistress (or at least truly convinced that he is) that's making him less a pariah and more a symbol of the male midlife crisis? For all his duplicity and entitlement, are some Americans -- particularly men -- feeling as much pity as outrage? Consider this small sample:

"This is a story of loneliness," New York Times columnist David Brooks said on "Meet The Press" Sunday. "[These guys] get to middle age, and they realize there's some emotional vacuum in their lives."

It "was about something much deeper than politics," wrote Gary Kamiya in Salon. "It was awful, but it was real. And painful as it is, in the repressed American sexual landscape, reality is better than artifice."

And then there was my dad, who told me the day of the Sanford news conference something to the effect that "you have no idea how easy it is for men to completely lose their minds because of infatuation with women."

No one's excusing Sanford's behavior. But as we slog through another week of the Jackson postmortem-paloooza and wonder at the fact that we're also still hearing about the South Carolina governor's love for certain tan lines, maybe it's worth asking ourselves why. Is it because we're uncategorically appalled? Or is it because maybe, just maybe, there's a tiny bit of Mark Sanford in, if not all men, quite a few of them? And that's more than you can say of Michael Jackson.