And further complications: Loy reveals to Powell why Gable had the guy killed; Loy tells Powell he wouldn't be governor if not for Gable's crime; Loy tells Powell she'll leave him if he doesn't spare Gable's life.
Now that's a drama.
Instead, we have Palin and her multiple family spectacles, often self-propelled, such as her recent drawn-out umbrage over a silly joke. And we have Sanford going missing for a week, then turning up in Argentina, and then on TV, and then everywhere, spilling his guts over the all-too-predictable reason for the secrecy: an extramarital affair.
Politician cheats on his wife? Gee, there's something that's never happened before or ever will again.
No, what gives Sanford's aventura amorosa such legs, so to speak, is the public mess he made of it, from the pretense that he was on a hiking trip in the Appalachians to his endless attempts to explain himself ever since.
And so it is with Palin, and her constant griping over how her daughters have been treated in the media, when she can't stop dragging them in front of the cameras herself.
It's all made me ever more grateful for those increasingly rare moments of discretion when I come across them. I recently saw a small item in the newspaper's archives, something I'd missed when it ran originally, in which an official announced his separation. End of the story.
Compare that to Sanford's postpartum - the news conference, the weeping to the Associated Press, the 518-word statement from his wife, followed by her own teary interview with the AP, the e-mail to supporters.
I did have bit of sympathy for Sanford at one point: He didn't make his wife stand there next to him before the cameras; he didn't trivialize the other woman as a meaningless indiscretion; he didn't blame political enemies for his own woes.
But that sympathy was fleeting. For one thing, he had voted as a congressman to impeach then-President Bill Clinton, condemning him for lying "under a different oath, and that's the oath to his wife," he told CNN at the time. "So it's got to be taken very, very seriously."
Why do these politicians never learn?
Whether it's moralizing over someone else's marital messes only to end up with a similarly untidy house, as Sanford has, or trumpeting that you're anti-earmarks when you have requested hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of them for your state, as Palin did - well, it's not just hypocritical, but just too easy to check the record.
There are documents, and these days almost always tape. And yet, neither Palin nor Sanford can seem to stop providing ever more tape.
Sanford in particular keeps updating us on how many times and where he and his soul mate mated, not just in Argentina but - another country heard from! - also New York. He's fleshed out other extramarital dalliances, helpfully noting that those didn't cross "the ultimate line ... the sex line."
Someone get this guy a better scriptwriter. Maybe the one who wrote that great line in that other black-and-white movie, Casablanca. The one that goes, "It doesn't take much to see that the problems of three little people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world."
