Everyone is captivated by a spectacular fall from grace or the salaciousness of an affair, and the political arena has provided more than its fair share of that type of voyeurism.

Soon-to-be-former New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer, who announced he will resign effective March 17 after being implicated in a prostitution scandal, is simply the latest.

Here is a round-up of some of the top scandals and controversies. First, the U.S.:

Gary Hart: The former Colorado senator and presidential hopeful may have inadvertently ushered in the modern era of tabloid political reporting when he invited journalists to follow him around as part of his response to rumours of an extramarital affair. Unfortunately for him, they did.

The Miami Herald published a story on May 3, 1987, about a young woman being seen leaving Hart's Washington, D.C. townhouse. Days later, the National Enquirer published photos of Hart on a yacht named the Monkey Business with that same young woman, Donna Rice, sitting on his lap.

Hart's presidential ambitions were temporarily put on hold. He tried to make a comeback, but it ultimately failed.

Bill Clinton: No political junkie of a certain age can forget America's 42nd president emphatically declaring on Jan. 26, 1998: "I did not have sexual relations with that woman!" meaning White House intern Monica Lewinsky.

Apparently, Clinton didn't consider oral sex to be "sexual relations."

The statement led in part to the U.S. House of Representatives impeaching the Democratic president, although the Senate ultimately didn't convict him. The Senate also acquitted him on a perjury charge.

"Slick Willie," as he was once known, got off to a rocky start in his presidential ambitions when a woman named Gennifer Flowers publicly declared in 1992 that she had been Clinton's lover while he was governor of Arkansas.

This led to a legendary appearance on CBS's 60 Minutes in which his wife -- Hillary Rodham Clinton, now a Democratic presidential hopeful herself -- said: "I'm not sitting here as some little woman standing by my man like Tammy Wynette. I'm sitting here because I love him."

That drew a protest from the now-deceased, weepy-voiced country singer, who wrote and sang "Stand By Your Man," the anthem of wronged women everywhere.

But Hillary's actions were seen as pivotal in helping Bill survive and then go on to win the Democratic nomination and the presidency.

"Hillary Clinton is an amazing woman," David Maraniss, a Washington Post reporter and author of the Clinton biography "First In His Class," told Canada AM in 1998.

"I think from the time they met at Yale Law School long ago, they realized that they could get some place together that they couldn't get to separately. They share a passion for politics and power and a dream to get into the White House.

"She went into the marriage, I think, with her eyes wide open. She knew at the time that he had this appetite for life and sex and I don't think it surprised her along the way. I think that she has an ability, as he does, to compartmentalize her life to a certain extent and say some things are more important than others and that's how she keeps going."

John F. Kennedy: The Democratic prince of "Camelot," elected in 1960 and assassinated in 1963, almost had a sex scandal from beyond the grave.

Victoria, B.C. resident Jack Worthington recently claimed he was JFK's love child, a claim that could not be proven and one that his family back in Texas categorically denies.

However, with JFK, it wasn't implausible. He was known for having a robust sexual appetite, but back in those times, the press tended to look the other way.

At least one person thought JFK, who has been romantically linked to Marilyn Monroe, was over-rated as a lothario.

JFK's Texan vice-president Lyndon Baines Johnson once claimed he'd had more women by accident than Kennedy had had on purpose, Maraniss said in a Jan. 26, 1998, washingtonpost.com online chat.

Canada

Our home and native land has been much tamer when it comes to sex scandals.

The biggest remains the Gerda Munsinger affair. She was an East German prostitute and Soviet Spy who had made the acquaintance of two Progressive Conservative cabinet ministers of John Diefenbaker.

She was quietly deported in 1961. One cabinet minister, Pierre Sevigny, quit cabinet in 1963. The matter didn't become public until 1966.

Another, George Hees, was hurt by the affair when he ran for the party's leadership in 1967, finishing a poor fourth.

Pierre Trudeau had an active dating life as a bachelor prime minister, but then married Margaret Sinclair -- a woman 30 years younger than himself -- in 1971.

The Liberal gained some sympathy when the marriage started to publicly disintegrate, leaving Trudeau as a single dad in office. Despite everything, Trudeau served as prime minister from 1968 to 1984, with one short interruption in 1979.

In recent times, romance and politics intersected when Peter MacKay and Belinda Stronach, both prominent Conservative MPs, broke up after Stronach crossed the floor to the Liberals in 2005.

A devastated MacKay posed with a dog when speaking with the media days later -- although reports later suggested that the dog may have been a loaner.

During one raucous 2006 exchange in the House of Commons after the Tories formed government, a Liberal yelled out, "What about your dog?"

Then-Foreign Affairs Minister MacKay was accused of pointing to Stronach's empty seat and saying, "You already have her." But MacKay denied making the statement.

For her part, Stronach made headlines when the then-wife of former Toronto Maple Leafs tough guy Tie Domi named her as the "other woman" in a divorce claim -- something that surfaced in September 2006. Stronach issued a statement that any troubles in the Domis' marriage had nothing to do with her.

Domi and Stronach did see each other for a time, but it was over by September 2007.

Besides that, there was rampant speculation in mid-2006 that Stronach and Bill Clinton were an item -- something she denied. According to a February 2006 Toronto Life profile, John F. Kennedy Jr. lobbied her to invest in his political magazine George only days before he died in a 1999 plane crash.

Britain

Britain is the birthplace of our parliamentary democracy, and as such, it has also been home to the mother of all sex scandals.

The Profumo affair, named after then-Secretary of War John Profumo, began in 1961. Profumo became acquainted with a young party girl named Christine Keeler, who also happened to be acquainted with a Soviet naval attaché named Yevgeny Ivanov.

While all this was going on, a little thing called the Cold War was happening in the background. The Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962 is when the world was considered to be as close to all-out nuclear war between the West and the then-Soviet Union as it has ever been.

In 1962, the affair became public. In early 1963, Profumo denied any impropriety and threatened to sue anyone who claimed otherwise.

By June, he was gone, having confessed to lying and misleading the House of Commons.

Keeler and Mandie Rice-Davies, another girl in the scene, became minor pop cultural figures (the whole thing was eventually made into a film -- 1989's Scandal). Vanity Fair magazine mentioned that the Victoria and Albert Museum in London displays a photo of a pouty Keeler straddling a reversed chair in the buff.

"It's difficult to imagine Monica's blue dress ever ending up at the Smithsonian," wrote James Wolcott in the February 2007 article.

There are myriad others in Britain, but the saddest and strangest was when Conservative MP Stephen Milligan was found dead at home in 1994, wearing stockings and suspenders and with a plastic bag over his head -- an apparent victim of asphyxiation while engaging in some type of autoerotic practice.

A final thought

While not every politician is sex-crazed, there are enough examples from various countries, cultures and points and history to conclude that sex and power are strongly linked the world over.

However, extramarital affairs in particular are seen by many as morally reprehensible, especially in the United States, which tends to show its puritan roots in these matters (former French president Francois Mitterand's mistress showed up at his 1996 funeral).

Here's an excerpt of an online exchange between Maraniss and a reader on Jan. 26, 1998:

Miami, Fla.: There are many great men in the world, but it takes a special man, besides being qualified to be president you need to have moral fortitude. Would you agree that if Mr. Clinton could not control his sexual appetite that he was not qualified to be president? Also, doesn't a man with this problem leave himself open to be blackmailed by his political enemies? It is then necessary to ask people to lie for political protection. Sound familiar?

David Maraniss: The question of whether a president who cannot control his sexual appetite should not be president is a tough one. It might mean that most of our presidents should not have been presidents.