The Spitzer bombshell must be both anguishing and oddly exhilarating for Hillary Clinton. Anguishing, because it recalls so luridly the nadir of her partnership with husband Bill - the revelation of his White House dalliance with Monica Lewinsky. Exhilarating, because it reaffirms the truism that, in politics, it ain't over till it's over - and that, right up to that final moment, almost anything can happen to alter the outcome.

Clinton, hanging on by her fingernails. has already escaped extinction twice during this Democratic primary season. She trails in the delegate count. But if she can take Pennsylvania next month, as well as some sort of replay in the outcast states Florida and Michigan, then watch out. The race will extend to the convention in August, and who knows what might happen?

Barack Obama could get hit by a Frisbee, his sourpuss wife, Michelle, might repeat her disparaging comments about America, more dubious acquaintances might surface in seamy Chicago, war and terrorism could rewrite the leadership equation, the candidate might say something stupid or a grisly skeleton tumble out of a closet. If Eliot Spitzer, Crusader of the Year, political dynamo, family man and potential future prez can be shot down and picked clean in a week, then nothing is out of the question.

Consider our two American cases. Spitzer is finished in public life, hoist on his own hypocrisy. He is as broken, politically, as John Profumo, the British cabinet minister who bedded Christine Keeler in a 1960s scandal that makes this latest one look like the Children's Hour.

(Sex, celebrities, Soviet espionage, prime ministerial fumbling, more sex, lies in the House - Profumo et al was one for the ages. It made those of us studying in England at the time proud to be part of the Empire. It ranks right up there with Charles Parnell and Kitty O'Shea, or Caesar and Cleopatra - or Antony and Cleopatra; the lady did get around. Spitzer and the girls of the Emperors Club are but a footnote in the great annals of scandal, ranking somewhere below our own delicious tale of Colonel Pierre Sévigny and Gerda Munsinger. But we digress.)

John Profumo eventually redeemed himself by devoting his life to social work in east London. It's hard to see the arrogant Spitzer spending selfless decades on the Bowery. There will be no comeback.

And all for what? "Love Client Number 9" purchased delights dispensed by high-class hookers - hypocritical, reprehensible even, but hardly the sort of thing to shake society and bring into play the full enforcement might of what seems increasingly, below the border, to be turning toward a police-and-imprisonment state.

Harvard law professor Alan M. Dershowitz, in the Wall Street Journal, reports that the authorities wiretapped 5,000 phone conversations and intercepted 6,000 emails in this case - using "surveillance and undercover tactics that are more appropriate for trapping terrorists than entrapping johns." That's bringing out the elephant gun to shoot a canary. Was it really necessary?