The Washington rumor mill apparently had been onto Foley for years.

While campaigning for a Senate nomination in 2003, Foley, who is single, was asked whether he was gay, and deflected the question as a matter of personal privacy before dropping out of the race.

Hastert should not get away with his last-minute call for a criminal investigation. We need an investigation of who knew what and when did they know it. The Post reports:

Mr. Foley's interests were so well-known that pages reportedly warned each other to watch out for him.

....House Majority Leader John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) said he learned of the matter last spring, and Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.), after first saying he heard about it only last week, confirmed yesterday that he also was informed early this year. What did the House leaders do with this information, and did they take steps to protect other pages?

Hastert's first response was to lie and say he only learned last week. Only after being nailed by Reynolds and Boehner, did he 'fess up.

Reynolds, chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, became the second senior House Republican to say that Hastert has known of Foley's contacts for months, prompting Democratic attacks about the GOP leadership's inaction.

I think this scandal has big, big legs. Maybe it will be the icing on the cake for November. During the Bush administration, fellow Republicans Jack Abramoff, Tom DeLay, Randy "Duke" Cunningham, Bob Ney and Scooter Libby have all gone down. Karl Rove made it through by the skin of his teeth. Who can view Republicans as anything but a party that fosters a culture of corruption

I also think Hastert could be toast.

Yesterday's developments revealed a rift at the highest echelons of House Republican ranks a month before the Nov. 7 elections, and they threatened to expand the scandal to a full-blown party dilemma.

At a minimum, if Hastert knew and did nothing about it, and even worse, allowed Foley to maintain his committee leadership positions, Hastert should lose his role as House speaker.

As for Foley, his hypocrisy is stunning. He based his career on fighting sexploitation of children.

At a White House Rose Garden ceremony on July 27, President Bush hailed Foley and some other House and Senate lawmakers as members of a "SWAT team for kids." Bush spoke while signing into law a broad child protection measure that included a Foley-sponsored provision requiring sex offenders to register in every state where they live, work or attend school.

Foley's arrogance is equally stunning.

During the congressional debate in 1998 over President Bill Clinton's affair with a White House intern, Foley called Clinton's actions vile and told the St. Petersburg Times that "it's more sad than anything else, to see someone with such potential throw it all down the drain because of a sexual addiction."

So is his acute sense of denial.

Legislating, he told National Public Radio on June 29, "is not necessarily just trying to brand people or create a scarlet letter or subject them to unnecessary ridicule, but it's really to set a bar and a standard by which they then decide, 'I better get help professionally,' 'I better go and see how I can deal with this problem,' or, 'I should absolutely avoid contact with young people in order to ensure I don't fall into this very serious problem.' "

Nothing in Washington happens in a vacuum. Republicans in the House knew. They tried to sweep it under the rug. They got caught. Now let them pay the price for violating the trust of the American people. We need to sweep the lot of them out of office.