Disillusioned or disgusted?

Not sure which of those emotions tugs at me more. All I know is, I'm disappointed, to put it mildly, at tawdry allegations that a former vice president of the United States made sexual advances on a Portland massage therapist who'd come to his hotel room following a 2006 speech in our fair city.

I won't pass judgment here -- I still haven't made it all the way through the 73-page transcript of the woman's statement to police, and I wonder if it was her or the cops who are responsible for this case not being pursued more aggressively much sooner -- but all too often in such cases, where there's smoke, turns out there's a bit of a fire.

The list of elected officials engaging in extramarital affairs and other slimy sexual conduct is too long to recite here, though it would include Clinton, Spitzer, Edwards, Sanford and Ensign. Heck, in Oregon alone, we've had Packwood, Goldschmidt and our current mayor, Sam Adams.

And now Al Gore.

I'd always thought of him as somewhere on the continuum between dull and straitlaced. But if these allegations are true, it only reminds us (me, anyway) of the gulf between public persona and private behavior.

Just two Sundays ago, I'd selected to run a piece that Deirdre Bair wrote for The New York Times shortly after the news broke that Al and Tipper were divorcing after four decades of marriage. In her essay about the "40-year itch," Bair said she'd interviewed more than 300 men and women in her research for a book on late-life divorce and was surprised by the "courage they showed as they left the supposed security of marriage."

"To them," she noted, "divorce meant not failure and shame, but opportunity."

Rather than condemn or speculate about the reasons for the Gores' breakup, Bair urged, we should wish them well.

Well.

I was prepared to do just that. But the emerging facts in this case just might cause me to change my mind. Nothing's proven yet and we have only one person's side of the story.

In the meantime, we'd all do well to remember another sobering lesson of this story. As Friday's lead editorial in The Oregonian states, it's "a cold reminder of how difficult it is for most people to seek justice after a sexual assault."