"Hell Hath No Fury ...

... like a woman scorned." True? Oh, you bet it's true, as pretty much any woman can tell you. The wisdom of those words has been reinforced in my mind several times recently, due to situations both personal and not.

First, the personal one. One day last week when I opened my e-mail, I had a message from an ex-boyfriend, or at least it looked that way before I clicked on it and opened it. He and I are in touch on a very casual basis, and the subject line was blank, so I admit I was curious when I saw his e-mail address in my In box. Inside, there was no message, just a link, which connected me to a website that sells Viagra and Cialis. Very strange. Later that day I got a second message, this time really from him, saying that someone had hacked into his address book and sent out some rogue messages. He didn't say who did it, but from where I sit it's a stunt that has "pissed off ex-girlfriend" written all over it.

In the public domain, the scandals currently enveloping Tiger Woods and John Edwards both appear to have elements of one or more scorned women at work. In Tiger's case, not only did his wife feel compelled to express her feelings by using a golf club as a battering ram, several of the girlfriends have rushed to speak out and cash in, leading one pundit to opine that if you're going to cheat, you should pick someone who has absolutely nothing to gain by being featured on the cover of US magazine.

As for John Edwards, the hell and the fury bubbling up around him this week is a result of screw-ups too numerous to count, but I read one article that speculated that the National Enquirer's original source for the story and for the pictures-of-John-holding-a-baby was actually baby-mama Rielle Hunter herself. The theory is that if the scandal destroyed not only his political career but his marriage as well, he would then be free to marry Rielle. I don't know if Ms. Hunter was the one who leaked the story or not, but it certainly sounds like something a scorned woman would do.

So I was in the "Just when you thought you've heard everything" zone when I came upon this. Go to Google News and type in "Charles Phillips" if you want all the sordid details. The short version is that a rich (and married) guy's ex-mistress set out to embarrass him, and it appears to have worked. Hell hath no fury? Yeah, that sounds about right.