In our view, President Donald Trump as much as admitted in a taped interview Thursday he'd had extra-marital affairs with porn star Stormy Daniels and Playboy Playmate Karen McDougal.
He didn't come right out and say it - he never has - but he told Fox News payments to the two women didn't come from his campaign. "They came from me," he said.
Trump made that statement because the latest national media exhilaration has been whether the payments came from campaign funds and whether that is legal. It's the most recent item to raise the hopes of the national media and the left that Trump somehow could be dispatched.
The argument about the payments aside for a moment, we feel compelled to say that we - and we believe the majority of Americans - still believe an extra-marital affair is wrong. It doesn't matter if the sex was consensual, or if the other party was a porn star, a Playboy Playmate or a White House intern.
What was wrong for a Bill Clinton was wrong for a Donald Trump.
Now we're not naive enough to believe his previous denials that these affairs ever happened. We just want him to acknowledge them, to admit he made a mistake, to apologize to his wife, to apologize to the other women.
It is, after all, Trump's character that did not allow this page, in the end, to personally endorse him in the 2016 presidential election. We saw his potential, we approved generally how he would govern, and we knew what good a Republican president and Republican Congress could do for the country. But taped recordings that were released late in the campaign of him describing his own conduct with women were too much. They violated the standards of what this page has stood for.
We're also not naive enough to believe most voters who cast a ballot for him didn't know what they were getting. They were getting a thrice-married man who'd admitted to previous affairs, whose bombastic statements could be both satisfying and scary, and whose rudeness frequently knew no bounds.
Trump, though, was a different animal not only from the Democrat occupant of the White House for the previous eight years but also from the dozen and a half more mainstream Republican candidates who offered themselves for the nomination alongside him. He said what many Americans were thinking, he stood up to the left-leaning national media and he seemed ready to fight for what he advocated.
More than a year and a half into his presidency, he has delivered on many of his campaign promises and remains popular with the majority of people who voted for him.
We also might note that the United States public that disapproved of Clinton's workplace affair in 1998 is not the same public that has observed Trump's comments about his reported liaisons in 2018. Although today's public is more secular than that of 20 years ago, the actions are no more justifiable.
Neither is the argument that the president's affairs occurred a decade before he ever ran for the presidency, while the specific affair in question of the 42nd president occurred when he was a resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
But back to the payment. Who pays a porn star and a Playboy Playmate for no reason? And later says the money "came from me"?
At issue is where the money came from. Trump's former lawyer, Michael Cohen, said Tuesday the payments were made "in coordination and at the direction of a candidate for federal office." Trump said the money came from a monthly retainer Cohen received, "not from the campaign, from which he entered into, through reimbursement, a private contract" with the women.
He said the contract "was used to stop the false and extortionist accusations made by her about the affair," adding that "money from the campaign, or campaign contributions, played no role in this transaction."
Trump also admitted in the Fox interview that had the payments come out of the campaign, "that could be a little dicey."
Federal election law allows candidates to contribute unlimited amounts of money to their campaigns. Some legal experts have said if that's what the president did, he's in no trouble. Or, they said, if he directed a lawyer (Cohen) to make the payments, and he then compensated the lawyer, that would be legal.
In the end, lawyers and courts will sort out the legality, or lack of it, of the payments. In the meantime, we hope Trump will avoid any more "I-did-not-have-sexual-relations-with-that-woman" moments and apologize for his behavior, not waiting as Clinton did until he had to admit his guilt in grand jury testimony. No one would be surprised at his admission, but an admission nonetheless would be welcome.