I could be forgiven for thinking it's an episode of Days of Our Lives (Is that still going?) and so could you if the G-Men weren't involved. Let's face it, what we have is melodrama, suspense, jealousy, a hot party girl and an FBI dude with no shirt on, all wrapped in a juicy script of betrayal and sex brought to you from the upper echelons of the U.S military establishment.
Let's denude it of all the officious nonsense and see it for what really is. Boy (C.I.A chief, David Petraeus) meets girl (Paula Broadwell) and, deciding that no one is going to miss a slice off a cut loaf, have an affair. Enter Party Girl, ( Socialite, Jill Kelley) who is rumoured to have gone the grope with Petraeus under the table. Girl threatens Party Girl! In the meantime the FBI have been diligently rummaging through the Petraeus email account's draft folder in search of dirt. Why? What have they got against their CIA counterpart? Do they think he's a terrorist in disguise or worse, a God damned COMMIE? Very curious....
The stark truth of this absurd caper is that the personal lifestyles of government powerbrokers including the CIA and FBI are nobody's business. David Petraeus did nothing that would jeopardize U.S security, nor did any of the others involved in the tryst. Actually the only security he needs to worry about is his own from his wife. That's where it belongs and should stay.
I blame J. Edgar Hoover! The FBI has been a moralizer ever since he took over the organisation way back in the 1920s. Hoover, a cross dresser and closet gay who both adored and feared his mother, compensated for his secret secrets by imposing his sharply narrow moral code on anyone else who came to his attention, which included the whole American nation. When you add the eternal streak of American puritanism to the mix this is what you get: a man's career destroyed over a personal error of moral judgement. Both he and Paula Broadwell have some explaining to do to their spouses, but not the FBI or the world for that matter.