Infidels.

As GOP biblical bullies and moral finger-pointers are painfully learning, the problem with casting the first stone is that it usually turns out to be a boomerang.

It is long past time, in fact. for the party of stern castigation and preachy moral pretense to take a hard fall at the hands of its own weaponry.

Talk about a political party pushing its luck. Since the day that Contract With America commandant Newt Gingrich showed up at his cancer-stricken wife's bedside with divorce papers, we have known that the only straight-and-narrow quality of much of the Republican leadership is its single-minded amorality. We've known that these guys have use for Christianity mainly as a consumer brand, that they cheat on the marriages they self-righteously claim to defend, that they enjoy gay life in secret while publicly bashing gays and blocking gay rights, that they pander to the prejudices of perpetually-screwed working whites while shilling for the corporations that do the screwing, and that their moral reservoirs run about as deep as a puddle in the Sahara.

So it is poetically fitting that someone like South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford -- a man who thumps the Bible in support of faithful heterosexual-only marriage and abstinence-only teenage education, who helped kick the adulterous Bob Livingston off the GOP bandwagon, and who called for Bill Clinton to resign for lying about sex -- is now forced to publicly reconcile his own inner infidel with the jihadism of his political party.

For a sharp treatment of the ironies and consequences of all this, go to Leslie Savan's June 30 blog in The Nation, where she writes, in part:

"Like many a sanctimonious sinner before him, Sanford's stands on gay marriage, abstinence-only education, and impeaching Bill Clinton for lying about sex have set him up to fall all the harder. But beneath the obvious hypocrisy of a family values Republican committing an offense-of-marriage act lies a deeper contradiction, one that must cleave the Republican soul. Whatever Sanford's--or John Ensign's, David Vitter's, or Larry Craig's--personal demons, their bad-boy adventures cut to the central irony of today's GOP: It's devoted to the idea of private wealth and securing the rights of the individual against the tyranny of the majority, but its members themselves must adhere to an ever-narrowing set of acceptable thoughts."

I think Sanford's wife, Jenny, summed things up pretty well when she responded to a reporter who asked if she thought her husband's doings in Argentina would affect his political future.

"His career is not a concern of mine," she said. "He's going to have to worry about that. I'm worried about my family and the character of my children."

Sounds as if she feels about as much empathy for the sinking fortunes of the Republican boys' club as the rest of us do.