SOUL FOOD:

“Faith…faith,” Eliot Spitzer once said, “affects every decision we make.” I doubt it was faith, though, that led him to become “Client 9” with the Emperors Club, a so-called “social introduction service” and alleged international prostitution ring.

You know the story. The zealous crime-fighting former New York state attorney general who, with a reputation for squeaky-clean politics, became governor of New York was snared in a federal wiretap that revealed he had paid $4,300 for four hours with a 22-year-old call girl.

Financial records obtained in the probe further suggest that, over a decade, Spitzer spent as much as $80,000 for prostitutes, concealing payments in a labyrinth of deceptive recordkeeping.

As attorney general he earned many monikers — among them, Steamroller — for his aggressive assaults on crime. He made many enemies for his unflinching style.

As pollster John Zogby noted shortly after news of Spitzer’s indiscretions, “He really made [some people’s] lives miserable, even though some of them turned out to be not that guilty.”

So perhaps the unabashed gloating and schadenfreude (the joy in another’s pain) given over to Spitzer’s fall from grace should have struck me as no surprise.

But it did. The ire and fury have not been directed at Spitzer’s ethical or moral lapses or at his infringement of the law.

Spitzer did not after all use government funds to pay for his trysts, as did former New Jersey Gov. Jim McGreevey.

Nor did he hold this nation’s highest post and use it to have sex with an intern in a government office.

He wasn’t the first and surely won’t be the last public official to participate in sexual indiscretions. As Spitzer was suffering his comeuppance, his successor, David A. Paterson, was confessing his own extramarital affairs.

And as political consultant Joseph Mercurio has noted, “Being a ‘john’ is less than a traffic offense in New York.” In two states it’s legal.

“We probably put these things too high on the scale of judgment,” Mercurio suggested to the Times Union days after Spitzer’s demise.

The ire and fury, though, is not about Spitzer’s “being a ‘john.’” It’s about his perceived arrogance, his seeming hypocrisy, his, as some say, unmerciful holier-than-thou- ness.

Canadian radio commentator John Gormley put it this way: “[Spitzer’s] fall eclipses even the disgraced evangelist Jimmy Swaggart, who railed against iniquity and sin while visiting hookers. All Swaggart could do was preach about sin. Spitzer put people in jail for it. What goes around, comes around.”

I’m still trying to make sense of just what this means. Unless we have no moral standards at all, all of us at times fall short of practicing what we preach.

No doubt, Spitzer’s fall was particularly steep. But does that mean he never should have pursued criminals and put them in jail?

Was he a hypocrite, never truly holding the values he professed? Or does he hold those values dearly though bested by an Achilles heel?

I haven’t heard any suggestion from Spitzer that he should be shown leniency that he, as attorney general, may have withheld from others.

Even harder for me to understand is the clamor over Silda Wall Spitzer sticking by her husband’s side in his darkest hour.

Are we to believe the only thing worse than a cheating husband is a cheated-on wife who pulls a Tammy Wynette and stands by her man?

“I find it nauseating…phony and awful,” a 38-year-old a doctoral student in a New York Starbucks was quoted in the Los Angeles Times as saying with “an exaggerated shudder.”

In the same front-page story Tobe Berkovitz from Boston University mused, “I don’t think most people have the fortitude to do otherwise.”

“It’s about wealth and power,” Sherman Smith, an accountant from Atlanta, deduced. “She loses too if she abandons him.”

“Silda Spitzer, Prop Wife?” asked Patt Morrison on the Opinion L.A. blog “Stick with the marriage if that’s what you want, by all means — but let him twist in the wind alone,” she fumed.

At the Houston Chronicle, Ellen Goodman agreed. “Just once,” she wrote, “let some politician’s wife…say no to the ritual public humiliation [and] hit the jerk upside the head…” Fox News reported that even Silda’s closest friends advised her to “take the kids and run.”

Tammy Bruce hoped that “after 19 years of marriage to this MalNar [that would be “Malignant Narcissist”] Silda will make a different, and better, decision than Hillary Clinton did in the aftermath of such a remarkable betrayal.”

Part pity, part condemnation for not living up to the expectations of strangers, the insinuations of spinelessness, falseness, greed and poor decision-making strike me as groundless and mean-spirited.

It all reminds me of a bit of wisdom my daddy would sometimes repeat to me when I would presume to know the heart of another.

“Point that finger if you wish,” he would say, “but notice how, when you do, four are pointing back at you.”

Those four fingers, I think, are now telling us we are not guiltless. For decades now we have heeded the Siren’s call of sexual freedom.

Now a new pornographic video is produced in the United States roughly every 39 minutes. Our attitudes toward the morality of sex work are at best ambivalent.

We host more than 200 million adult Web pages on the Internet. The next big host is Germany at 10 million.

A recent survey has revealed that one in four teenage girls has a sexually transmitted disease, perhaps a reflection of our attitudes on casual sex, even among children.

The divorce rate is on the decline in the United States, but only because the rate of marriage is down, too. We still have the highest divorce rate and the highest rate of solo parenting in Western world. And now we would add the Spitzer family to those statistics.

Where Jesus would say to Eliot, “Go, and sin no more,” we instead sneer, “What goes around comes around, Bub.” And to Silda, forget those 20 years of marriage, it’s, “Run, and take the kids.”

MICHÈLE MARR is a freelance writer from Huntington Beach. She can be reached at michele@soulfoodfiles.com.