DENNIS MYERS Against the Grain Advertisement

It's been five weeks since John Ensign shared with us the news of his extramarital affair and the story still keeps on giving, mainly in Las Vegas.

With the husband of Ensign's paramour playing the news media like a violin, story after story keeps developing. It's not often the Washington Post chases a story generated by daily newspapers in a small western city, but that's what has been happening. Along the way, the nation has been introduced to the previously little known Sen. Ensign.

It has produced some fascinating throwbacks to 1920s journalism. "Sen. John Ensign's folks gave galpal $96G" was the headline in the Boston Herald. When was the last time we saw "galpal" used by journalists? (The Urban Dictionary defines galpal as "a guy who hangs around with all the girls," which suggests its meaning has changed a lot since Hearst or whoever originated it.)

The Ensign matter has also brought out some great writing in some of our best journalists. In the New York Times, Gail Collins wrote, "Last month Ensign, a Nevada Republican, called a press conference to confess that he had had an affair with a former staff member. That was when we learned, to general surprise, that Ensign had been widely regarded as a possible future presidential candidate."

The sentence "John Ensign is an important figure in US politics" has vanished from Ensign's entry on the WhoRunsGov Web site.

One Web site produced a music video for the Ensign affair, using a Talking Heads song: "I'm a big man in a great big town/Years ago who would believe it's true/Goes to show what a little faith can do."

Ensign's faith and general self-righteousness have gotten a lot of attention. His affair is the biggest Las Vegas display of heterosexual respect for the sanctity of marriage since Britney Spears, wearing a baseball cap, was walked down the aisle of a Las Vegas wedding chapel by a bellhop to marry a childhood friend and then promptly described it as "a joke that went too far" and got it annulled.

There have been some beneficial aspects to the coverage. More people now know that Ensign was a casino executive before becoming a legislator, which helps put in context his white coated television commercials showing him as a veterinarian.

To Ensign's credit, the 2004 news release on his Web site headed "ENSIGN DEFENDS SANCTITY OF MARRIAGE ON SENATE FLOOR" has not been taken down.

Ensign and fellow scandalee Mark Sanford have been setting a standard for political sex scandals, according to foreign news coverage. "What is it with Canadian politicians that they can't even generate a good scandal, when right across the border there are so many excellent examples of how it's done?" asked Canada's National Post, which put a "So little of substance, taking up so much space" caption under Ensign's photo and quoted the Las Vegas Sun's immortal observation that Ensign and his lady love's husband "were bonded by their conservative evangelical faith."

In reading all this stuff, it occurs to me that no one has yet found anything illegal in Ensign's activities. For instance, it was reported (through his parents) he allegedly paid hush money. But hush money isn't necessarily illegal. It was paid to the Watergate burglars to keep them quiet in front of the grand jury, but in Ensign's case it was paid to suppress bad publicity.

As Las Vegas reporters have kept this story going, it has made it clear, there is room in newspapers for lots of daily news stories about John Ensign, which makes me wonder whether, when they have to go back to covering him as a senator instead of a scandal figure, will they finally start covering his activities in the senate?

I'm not talking about occasional interviews on his visits home or random stories about his votes on particularly hot issues. I'm talking about devoting the same kind of space that has been used for this scandal story to his votes to make unborn children eligible for SCHIP (the federal State Childrens' Health Insurance Program) or his vote to do away with federal car efficiency standards.

Home state news coverage of Ensign has been so shallow that most Nevadans have no idea of his voting positions on issues. It would be nice if the state's daily newspapers and news broadcasts, having demonstrated how much space they can devote to Ensign, would now tell us as much about where he stands as they have told us about where he sleeps.