A good writer should be able to put himself in the shoes of others. You don’t need to rob a bank to write a decent crime novel, but you do need to understand the motivations and thought processes of someone who would rob a bank.

Apparently, I will never write a novel about politics or politicians. Try as I might, I CANNOT understand how a United States governor thinks he can slip away from his aides, his family, and the press… and fly off to a South American country… to continue an extra-marital affair he’s had going for a year. Did he really think nobody would notice? Really and truly?

And I am once again reminded of a pet theory that I have. It’s a theory that usually I try not to think about, beacuse it’s a theory that, if true, has ugly ramifications, and it’s not like anybody can do anything about it. The theory is this:

A higher percentage of our politicians — as compared to the population at large — are completely goddamned insane.

They are the functioning insane, make no mistake about it. They can all drive cars and take out mortgages and tie attractive necktie knots. But they are still… not right. We’re long used to it by now — it’s only moderately exciting when another high-ranking politician is caught with a prostitute in the back of a speeding limo. But when you really stop and think about it, there is something wrong with these people. Any rational person who aspires to attain a position smack dab in the middle of the public spotlight — and who then achieves that position — would then say to himself:

“Well, I did it. I have reached the wheelhouse, and now I can help steer the ship. I have power, and I have almost assured wealth. However, there is a tradeoff in this: From now on, I cannot possibly be caught with a prostitute in the back of a speeding limo. I must remember this. Perhaps I should have my wife remind me periodically.”

But no. Goodness gracious, how they ever do find themselves in that metaphorical limo, and how surprised they always are when it crashes into a tree. By now it’s just a joke — a two-day cycle in the headlines, a few one liners from Letterman, a bunch of references on Twitter — and then it’s gone until the next one comes along. It seems like it’s been a long time since we asked ourselves: Should someone this stupid, this arrogant, and (usually) this hypocritical be leading us in the first place?

And the answer is: Hell no. Alas, we usually don’t find out about these things until after we’ve given them the keys to the governor’s mansion.

It’s tempting to make a comparison to air travel. Airplanes crash every once in a while, but that doesn’t mean air travel isn’t safe. And just because a politician is caught with a woman who is not his wife, or sells power to the highest bidder, or sets up members of his family in plum government-funded jobs, or trades on insider knowledge to make a killing in the stock market, or gets the taxpayers to build things that will subsequently have the politician’s own name on them, or… what was my point again?

Oh, right. Even though politicians do all those things, that doesn’t mean all politicians are insane. That’s certainly what we’d like to think. That’s what we do think, as evidenced by our willingness to send our own congressmen back to work while demanding that everybody else throw their bums out.

I’m no longer sure it’s true. I’m starting to think they’re all crazy, or so many of them that it might as well be all of them. In the wake of Blagojevic’s rampant corruption, the state of Illinois discussed the possibility of making politics more transparent and less easy to cheat. And what do you know but they changed their minds. The politicians in the most corrupt state in the Union decided it doesn’t need any further anti-corruption laws. What does that tell you about the future plans of these politicians?

What can be done about insane people wishing to become our leaders? I really don’t know. They all seem so normal at first. (Well, maybe not Blagojevich.) You can’t ask during the campaign. You can’t stand up during one of the Town Hall debates and say, “Yes, I have a question for the senator. Are you out of your freaking gourd?” Even if you could do that, it wouldn’t work. The senator would chuckle indulgently and say, “Of course not!” and everybody would say, “Whew! What a relief,” and then the senator would get elected, and then two weeks or a year or ten years later he’d be caught selling Tennessee to Lithuania.

So nothing can be done about it. Politics attracts insane people the way sports attracts the athletic. It’s just the way it’s going to be. But I do have a halfway solution.

We need a new reality television show that aspires to expose crazy politicians. The news shows don’t seem interested — they only tell us when a politician has already crashed the limo — so it’s up to the producers of The Bachelor and Celebrity Boxing to step in. Break out the hidden cameras and bait the politicians with sexy women and briefcases full of money. Get a Lithuanian actor to offer to buy Tennessee. Make these politicians so paranoid they won’t dare try anything corrupt or foolish out of fear. And those politicians that are so crazy that they take the bait anyway — well, at least we’ll get an evening’s entertainment out of it.