What do you think the odds are if the HBO series “In Treatment” returns for another season, one plot line will involve a former politician in therapy trying to come to terms with the implosion of his career and marriage after being caught up in a high-priced call girl ring?

As falls from grace go, the fast track decline and free fall of Eliot Spitzer was the stuff of Shakespeare meets a Greek tragedy.

And yes, like everybody else who has followed this story, two essential questions remain: A) What the &^%$#*^$ was he thinking? and/or B) Why would the aggrieved Mrs. Spitzer agree to appear in public standing next to this dreadful, horrible, sleazy little man?

I have been around politicians and politics all my life and still the behavior of some of these “public servants” never ceases to confound me.

By any standard of rationality, how does it happen that a pol with a stellar reputation for probity, a man who had spent his career on the way to the New York governor’s mansion crafting an image as a tough-minded, moralistic crime-fighting prosecutor allow himself to get caught up in a big bucks prostitution ring, spending possibly as much as $80,000 for the services of hookers?

Indeed, Spitzer’s name had been bandied about as a possible future presidential candidate. And now he has become a national laughing stock in less than a week.

The dirty little secret of public life is that in places like Albany and Tallahassee, the corridors of government are filled with beautiful women turned on by the cologne of power. Good grief, a politician could look like Shemp Howard and still get luckier than Wilt Chamberlain.

So, putting aside for the moment questions of morality, if it was simply extramarital sex that Gov. Spitzer was interested in he would found plenty of willing women to satisfy his needs for not much more than the cost of a cocktail. Think of the savings!

You could make a case that this was never really about sex.

A 48-year-old man easily recognized in places like Washington, accompanied by a security detail no less, does not engage in such monumentally stupid and high, high, high, high risk behavior simply because he truly believes sex for $4,000-a-pop (no pun intended) with a harlot is somehow going to be quantitatively better than a night spent with a very, hot and desirable lobbyist.

It’s not the sex. It’s the danger, the risk of discovery, the sneaking around that is the turn on.

And it’s also the arrogance, the hubris, the ego that drives figures like Eliot Spitzer to delude themselves into thinking they are bullet-proof, even while they are in the act of shooting themselves in the foot.

In the end, Spitzer joins a long list of gladhanders who truly stepped on their ..., well you get the idea.

Some pundits have suggested that after such a tawdry scandal, Eliot Sptizer’s political career is more dead than Warren Harding, who knew a thing or two about ladies of the evening.

They are probably right.

But if Spitzer is looking for a role model when it comes to career rehabilitation, he should look no further than fellow New Yorker, sportscaster Marv Albert, who was charged felony forcible sodomy, which also included allegation of kinky biting.

And let us not forget the pictures of Marv Albert wearing women’s underwear. Brrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

In time Albert pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor assault and battery charge and sodomy counts were dismissed.

Now, eventually Marv Albert, after what had to be the mother of all embarrassments, returned to his broadcasting job, which might suggest if the public can forgive and forget Marv Albert in a women’s panties, it might reserve a small cup of compassion for Eliot Spitzer.

Just how much sympathetic understanding Silda Spitzer is willing to extend to her dope of a husband is another matter.