Unintended Consequences

If you think the Petraeus sex scandal is just a sex scandal, consider:

• Both "other woman" Paula Broadwell and "other, other woman" Liz Kelley have now hired high-powered defense attorneys. Kelley has also hired a well-known crisis communications/PR guru. 
• Broadwell's home was searched by FBI agents last night and they carried out boxes of documents, a laptop computer and a briefcase.  
• A second 4-star general is now being investigated, on the basis of having exchanged 20,000 or more pages of e-mail communications with Ms. Kelley over the last couple of years.  
• The FBI agent to whom Ms. Kelley initially expressed her concerns about the threatening e-mails that turned out to be from Ms. Broadwell, had sent Kelley pictures of himself "shirtless." When the investigation didn't proceed as quickly as he thought it should, he leaked the story to a member of Congress, who told Eric Kantor, who told the director of the FBI.
• Broadwell's father says there's a lot more to this story and that the truth will eventually come out. 

Yikes. Are you still with me? Do we need a flow chart? In my original post about the scandal I said that things were sure to get juicy. I had no idea.

It's safe to say that when General Petraeus decided to get naked with his biographer, he didn't anticipate this. When Broadwell sent the original e-mail messages to Kelley, she didn't anticipate this. When Kelley asked the FBI to check into those e-mails, she didn't anticipate this. And what the heck were Kelley and General John Allen talking about in their 20,000+ e-mail messages anyway? Even if they were only discussing the weather and her daughter's upcoming multi-cultural Thanksgiving pageant, it's safe to say that the General may have been distracted from his important work making the world safe for democracy, or some such thing. It's entertaining to speculate about and heaven knows it's manna from heaven for a blogger, but still. Real people, with real families are at the center of this and their lives, and probably their careers, will never be the same. You never know where things will lead when people start secretly getting naked...