CONSERVATIVES HAVE BEEN HAVING a lot of fun with the Dick Morris affair. And far be it from me to be a spoilsport. It’s hard to top a story with toe- sucking! prostitutes! and a love — or is it lust? — child! (Although Roger Stone has managed to top it with a story that makes Morris’s sex life look positively wholesome. These consultant types are so competitive.) And Republicans have been able to score a few political points about the company the Clintons have kept and their manifest lack of embarrassment about it.

But conservatives ought to be careful in exploiting the Morris scandal, lest they reinforce an idea that is typically used to their detriment: the notion that hypocrisy — in this case, Morris’s deft positioning of President Clinton as a family-values candidate while conducting an affair with the founder of A Woman’s Personal Touch cleaning service — discredits the ideas associated with a hypocritical purveyor.