And so, yet another politician has run afoul of dat ol’ debbil, Youthful Indiscretions.

Christine O'Donnell, Delaware’s Republican candidate for U.S. Senate, appeared on “Politically Incorrect” 20-plus times not because she was particularly brilliant, but because she provided good material.  She was a) cute, b) an extremely moralistic right-wing Christian and c) an anti-masturbation advocate.  Sort of the trifecta for a talk show like Bill Maher’s.

When she said she “dabbled in witchcraft” during high school, she wasn’t real specific about her dabbling; apparently, its high point was a date with a “witch,” during which they had a late-night picnic on a Satanic altar (I don’t know a lot about Satanism, but I know just enough about what happens on a Satanic altar to say: Ewwwww).

Given her past of making rather silly statements and urging people to not do something that’s absolutely none of her business, it was a prime “gotcha” moment. In the end, it probably won’t hurt O’Donnell too much. But then, if she really has a chance of winning in November, they ought to throw up a wall around Delaware and designate it the national lunatic asylum.

I thought her revelations relatively mild. That’s especially true because it happened when she was in high school, which is the prime age for doing really stupid things.

Were it not for revelations like O’Donnell’s, about half of the stories you see during a political campaign year would never be written. It’s become standard procedure for the media to conduct a sort of journalistic colonoscopy on every candidate for every office. It happens at every level, but it’s particularly blatant in the case of candidates for national office, because their campaigns are so stage-managed that finding real news is slightly more difficult than finding Jimmy Hoffa.

It’s become something of a cliché that it’s a miracle anybody runs for office anymore, since it opens their whole life up to that kind of minute examination. It’s a measure of the immaturity of our political discourse that anybody even cares what somebody did in high school, short of shooting up the library.

Still, I know I won’t be running for office any time soon. I wasn’t a particularly wild kid, but suffice it to say that I grew up in the late 1970s, the last great age of excess. I’m not going into any great detail here, but if my mom knew some of what I did in high school and college, I’d still be grounded, which is pretty hard to explain when you’re in your 50s. I will admit, though, that unlike Bill Clinton, I inhaled (and even ate once or twice, which is the source of one of the funnier stories I’m not going to tell you).

But I eventually surrendered gracefully the things of youth (mostly) and was lucky enough that I never got addicted, hurt or killed. There are a lot of people out there like me whose era of youthful stupidity now brings on nothing more serious than a rueful smile and a prayer of thanks that God watches over idiots.

Some people not only cherish their youthful indiscretions; they become part of a sort of life shtick. I’ve always been fascinated by a certain type of person – usually preachers – who talk about what they were like when they were dirtballs earlier in life. They’ll describe their time as a biker or bank robber or some other kind of black hat and make themselves sound like the biggest, baddest cat who ever walked the earth. But now, when they’re telling you that story, they’re extremely pious and good. They’re the kind of people who make Christine O’Donnell look like Heidi Fleiss.

Such people, it seems, have to live their lives at one extreme or the other. For whatever reason, they can’t live where most us do, in the middle, neither saint nor demon. When they’re bad – at least to hear them tell it – they’re really bad, and when they’re good, they’re saintly, or at least aspire to sainthood. Those really are two opposite forms of the same impulse. It’s a sort of all-in existence that would simply exhaust most people physically, spiritually and emotionally. I can’t imagine it’s a pleasant way to live.

Still, if that’s the way you have to order your world for it to make sense, it’s your life. It’s always a fascinating exercise to look back on your life’s arc and follow how you got where you are. Not only do you think about the indiscretions you made in the past; if you’re lucky, you remember the small moments when the music of chance hit a certain note that made all the difference. One of the realizations that mark being a grown-up is that so much of your life hinges on moments you can’t control and, in fact, maybe couldn’t even recognize at the time.

That’s the real, maybe the only, value of youthful indiscretion. William Blake said, “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.” That can be taken too far, but a little youthful excess, even a little youthful stupidity, can prove to be a good thing if you can learn from it.

And that’s the key right there. Doing stupid things, especially when you’re young, isn’t the problem. Doing stupid things again when you’ve already done them and you’re old enough to know better is the problem. Jails are full of people who never learned that.

Christine O’Donnell’s probably hoping the Senate is full of them too.