Guys, won’t you learn from experience? Tim Mahoney won his US Congressional seat after Mark Foley, the previous representative from the district in Florida, resigned. Why? The bachelor Foley had sent sexually explicit emails to congressional pages, teenage boys. Sex scandal!

Now Mahoney, 52, who came to office two years ago with the campaign slogan “Restoring America’s values begins at home,” has admitted to sexual affairs (plural), and a payoff to a former mistress.

Mahoney, who lives in Palm Beach Gardens, is, unlike Foley, married. And, although his wife, Terry, stood by him a week ago as he admitted that he had created “pain” in his marriage, she now, no surprise, wants a divorce.

Mahoney admitted paying a campaign worker and former mistress, Patricia Allen, and her lawyer $121,903 to prevent a lawsuit over sexual harassment. A second relationship was also charged: Mahoney had an affair with a Florida woman who came to Washington to get FEMA aid for a 2004 hurricane. She got a $3.4 million federal grant.

Since Tim and Terry Mahoney have been married for 22 years, and he was a wealthy venture capitalist and computer marketer before he was a Congressman, and they have a daughter, Bailey, in college, and he has already admitted to adultery, and she campaigned hard for him when he sought election, Terry would presumably get a generous settlement.

For one thing, her court papers say, obviously referring to the $121,903 payoff, Tim Mahoney “recently sold jointly owned real property,” put the proceeds into his own account, and “dissipated funds from said account.”

Those were marital assets. Her divorce petition says that she is “in need of temporary, lump sum, rehabilitative and permanent periodic alimony, which the husband is well able to provide for.”

Rep. Mahoney lists his net worth as between $3 million and $12.7 million.

With the confidence of a captain of the girls' basketball team, Sarah Palin swished her way into the office of Mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, took a jump shot at being Governor of Alaska, and then slam dunked the nomination for the Republican vice presidency.

Along the way, she’s accomplished a feat that often sidelines powerful women. Throughout her impressive career, she has never made her husband look diminished.

How she has dribbled her way around this challenging issue is a subject truly worthy of debate. After all, studies in Social Forces and The Journal of Marriage and Family say that women who are more successful than their husbands have higher divorce rates.

Many powerful women have come forward to admit that their careers have sent their relationships to the bench, including Pink and Reese Witherspoon. Amy Adams in this month’s Vanity Fair says she’s looking for a guy who won’t look at her success as his failure.

Sarah Palin, however, seems blissfully unvexed. Using her arsenal of charm like a lethal weapon, she is showing America that you can be powerful and sexy at the same time. And you can keep your studmuffin by your side, looking happy.

Hillary Clinton, Golda Meir, Margaret Thatcher, Angela Merkel — none of these women’s relationships with their husbands conveyed much marital heat in public. The husbands were more likely to get their wives into hot water, or have been so lukewarm, no one paid any attention to them.

Now we have Todd Palin, the hot political hubby.

At campaign stops, Todd Palin looks macho while doing nothing more than standing there holding their baby.

Gov. Sarah Palin may be not be getting a wink of sleep now that an Alaska state judge allowed a probe to go forward into whether she abused her power. The Republican vice presidential nominee is under fire for pressuring Public Safety Commissioner Walt Monegan to fire her ex brother-in-law, a state trooper.

The charges are that pressure to fire the trooper came from the Governor herself, her husband, Todd, and her staff. After Monegan did not agree, she fired him, citing disagreement over budget cuts.

And to her, that's a heck of a good reason and why should it be questioned otherwise?

On Thursday Judge Peter Michalski threw out the lawsuit filed by five Republican state legislators who claimed that Palin was the victim of an unfair partisan probe. The Republicans appear to be worried that a damaging report may surface before Election Day and affect voters. Or at least the kind of voters who vote based on performance.

The attorney for the five state legislators, Kevin Clarkson, claimed that the body that ordered the investigation had exceeded its authority.

But Michalski agreed with defense attorney Peter Maassen, who argued that the Legislature has broad authority to investigate the governor. The mere appearance of impropriety does not mean any individual's right to fairness was violated, Michalski wrote in his decision.

“It is legitimately within the scope of the legislature's investigatory power to inquire into the circumstances surrounding the termination (of) a public officer the legislature had previously confirmed,” the judge wrote.

Pop sensation Pink isn’t blue that she’s through with her ex-husband, the motocross biker Carey Hart. But she does blame her career. She’s not alone in feeling work drove her marriage straight into the dirt.

In an interview, Pink says, “It ‘s such a cliché when you talk about a Hollywood divorce, but the scheduling did get very hard. And it seemed that I was always the one left in charge of it. I got tired of being the Schedule Woman.”

Indeed, it can be exhausting having to juggle so much. Which is why one West Virginia University study shows that working women have a higher divorce rate and cites as a major irritant the disparity between the housework they do, and the housework their mate does.

Maybe it’s also because guys seem to have the lazy gene but when you are capably steering a demanding career, it’s not easy to come home and cater to a husband who collapses into a chair and expects burgers and beer, even if he has had a hard day being a Moto X daredevil.

She married Hart in 2006 in a celebrity-packed wedding in Costa Rica. He, now 32, was a star of “The Surreal Life” reality show and is famous for his tattoo parlors, Hart & Huntington, in Las Vegas, Cabo, and Hawaii.

When you have a career, and like Pink, you are young, successful and fun, you don’t need to put up with a guy who isn’t doing even 65 percent of his part. Financial independence does give you the ability to say, or sing, “See ya.”

In fact, that is what the 28-year-old Pink did. In a new song, she belts out the following lyrics, which could be interpreted as a slap in you-know-who’s face.

“And I don’t need you/ And guess what?/ I’m having fun.”

Japanese husbands may want to cry “entrapment” over the practices of a company that hires professional seducers to help unhappy wives get rid of their husbands.

In most U.S. states, you can just say sayonara to husbands who are belligerent, boorish or belching bores. But In Japan, where women’s rights are not highly valued, wives now see the value in fetching divorces by using fetching women to lure their husbands, thus giving them the necessary grounds for divorce.

The Times of London ran an excerpt from Lesley Downer’s new book, The Last Concubine, which reports the blow by blow — pardon the expression — of several of these stings. Here’s one:

“3.30 pm. Mr. A is outside a bank in a busy part of Ikebukuro, a faintly seedy area of Tokyo, waiting for his date. He beams as she teeters across the road on high heels. Kyoko, 20, is half his age. She has a mane of black hair, sloe eyes, a fetching smile and a cute giggle. Her blouse is open to reveal her cleavage and she has on a short skirt and sheer black tights. Mr. A is a bald 40-year-old salesman in a crumpled gray suit and glasses.

“Mr. A doesn’t know that a team of private investigators is recording his every move. The boss, the ebullient Mr. Tomiya, lurks behind a lamppost on the other side of the road and takes photographs as Kyoko meets Mr. A. Tomiya’s equipment includes a packet of cigarettes and a pen, both of which are actually cameras. Shimizu, a heavy-set man with a bullet head and cropped hair, carries a black bag. It contains a camera with which he films continuously through a tiny hole in the bag. A third man acts as a lookout. …

“When presented with the evidence, the embarrassed husband not only agrees to the divorce but agrees to favorable terms for the wife.”

With his presidential campaign seemingly going nowhere and rumors of its demise becoming louder every day, it almost seems irrelevant to spend much time discussing Rudy Giuliani's personal life. But Stacy Schneider offered up a nice take this week on Huffington Post. In fact, she pretty well nails it when she asks how Rudy can have the hubris to run for president and not expect his personal life to dog him every step of the way.

It's so interesting, the expectations we have of our leaders. We are an imperfect society. Our divorce rate is, what, about 50 percent? Nobody's life is perfect. But we go crazy the second a public figure or politician has an affair or splits up. People will never stop making Monica Lewinsky jokes at Bill Clinton's expense. And Rudy's missteps — his mistreatment of his ex-wife and his children — are just as fair game.

On one hand, it's unfortunate that we get bogged down in these things and pay more attention them than we do to a politician's ideas. But I think that what goes on in a politician's personal life can tell you a lot about what kind of person he or she is. It speaks to the question of integrity. How can you trust someone who would cheat on his own wife? Wouldn't it be great if, in one of the many debates there have been over these last months, somebody would have asked Rudy that?

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You have to love stories like this.

Jennifer Heath is an American citizen living in Fiji. She married a local man but after 12 years of marriage he decided to divorce her and move back to the US. This left her on her own with children to support.

Then, in 2004, she and her ex decided that since neither one was seeing anybody they would meet in California for Christmas. After the celebrations, instead of flying back to Fiji, Ms. Heath decided to fly to London and Asia to shop for pearls, which she had always loved.

A jewellery business was born.

She started by selling at her local market, but now works from her home in Lami, with nine other employees working for her. In 18 months, her business has taken her around the world six times. While her customers are mostly commercial, many individuals buy from her, especially for weddings.

The best part? While at the market, she met Richard Heath, originally from Napier, New Zealand. They are now married, and Mr. Heath has quit his job with the Hawkes Bay Chamber of Commerce to work for his wife.

From the death of a marriage comes a truly new life.

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Divorce is hard enough when it's just between two people. It's even more complicated when there are children involved. But what happens if you and your soon-to-be ex own a business together?

I saw that question posed in a tax advice column the other day, and the answer provided something valuable, beyond the simple X's and O's of how the assets are shared.

Sure, there was the standard discussion of the tax implications — the issues to consider if you or your ex wants to sell off your share of the business, or if both of you want to sell. But then there's the other possibility: Nobody sells anything and the two of you continue to operate the business together. And that's the part of this that I found most interesting.

No matter how much we talk about collaborative divorce and co-parenting through a divorce, it's easy to assume that two people who split up are so eager to be rid of one another that they're never going to talk again once the divorce is final. But increasingly that's not the case. For every acrimonious divorce, there are plenty of divorced couples who spend holidays together with their kids. And if your business is your child — or one of your children — there's no reason to believe you shouldn't co-parent it as well.

Is it easy? Of course not. But guess what? That's life. Or that's post-divorce life, I should say. None of it is going to be easy. But it's what you've got. You adapt, you learn to work with it and you continue to live your life.

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He's come a long way since his days as Jeff Spicoli in "Fast Times At Ridgemont High" and his first marriage to Madonna. But Sean Penn is back in the tabloids.

The actor and his actress wife Robin Wright Penn are getting a divorce. As celebrity marriages go, this one lasted quite a long time — 11 years. There aren't any details of the split circulating yet, but you can bet there will be eventually. Will this one become the first celebrity mess of 2008, or will it be handled gracefully? Who gets what? What was in their prenup?

New year on the way in a few days, but same old celebrity divorce questions to ponder.

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Because I’ve been known to have a one-track mind, I’m still thinking about what I wrote about last week: Should some people just stay single?

My partner and I have been talking about this a lot lately. We are two of the most compatible people I’ve ever known. We live together. We run a business together. We work in our home office together.

And we are completely and utterly sick of each other. Actually, that’s not entirely true. We’re not sick of each other, we’re sick of not being alone.

Here’s the thing: We’re both very independent people. We’re both people pleasers. We both go out of our way to make the other person desperately, completely, ragingly happy. It’s exhausting, and I don’t think we want to do it any more.

We want to eat what we want for dinner. We want to stop discussing the color of paint on the walls. We want to stop planning and talking and communicating. We both just want to be left alone.

I was reading one of my favorite columnists, Lisa Kogan from Oprah’s O Magazine. She and her — what? Husband? Fiance? Boyfriend? Non-domestic partner? — live in two different countries and have no plans to change that situation. They’re in love. They’re monogamous. They’re happy. They see each other once a month.

I wonder if that would work for us. I mean, separate continents might be a bit much. I’m not in love with the idea of schlepping the baby across the ocean on a monthly basis. But maybe separate places in the same city might work.