Mike Huckabee campaigns as an ardent upholder of traditional marriage. On his website he says he led the move in Arkansas to adopt the practice of "covenant" marriage, and that he supports amending the U.S. Constitution to prohibit gay people from marrying. He and Mrs. Huckabee say they believe in the New Testament edict that “a wife is to submit herself graciously to the servant leadership of her husband.”

But if you can tell a lot about a man by the company he keeps then it appears that Huckabee’s moralizing about the sanctity of marriage is mainly just for show. For example, he takes advice on political strategy from Dick Morris, the sleazy Fox News Clinton-hater who was outed in a tabloid magazine over a decade ago by his paid mistress — and who was one our nominees last year to the GOP Adulterers Hall of Fame.

Huckabee has tried to keep his relationship with Morris on the q.t. (He even lied about it to George Stephanopoulos.) On the other hand, he was brazenly unashamed to have former Sen. Tim Hutchinson, one of Arkansas’ most notorious adulterers, serve as his surrogate in television interviews in Iowa and New Hampshire.

What makes Hutchinson’s betrayal of his wife particularly scandalous is the fact that, like Huckabee, he is an ordained minister as well as a Republican politician who won elections by presenting himself as an adherent of moral values, including, of course, the sanctity of marriage.

But what makes Hutchinson notorious is the timing of his of his affair with a much-younger member of his Senate staff:

Scant weeks after voting to remove Bill Clinton from office, the one-time Baptist preacher made a fortuitously timed announcement of his impending divorce from his wife of 29 years. Having cast a stone at Clinton, he called his own divorce “intensely personal” and refuses to answer questions. Also unavailable for comment was the much younger member of Hutchinson’s staff with whom he’d been “romantically linked,” as people said in a politer era. Reporters couldn’t find Randi Fredholm anywhere. She’d flat disappeared. A suspicious person might wonder if she’d gone into hiding.

After Hutchinson spent a relatively brief interval as a Washington bachelor, Randi reappeared as the new Mrs. Tim Hutchinson.

(Tim’s even more holier-than-thou brother, then-Rep. Asa Hutchinson, was one of the Impeachment Managers in the House.)

Hutchinson was defeated for reelection in 2002 by David Pryor, a Democrat. Pryor did not make Hutchinson’s adultery — or hypocrisy — a campaign issue, at least in part because he didn’t have to. Both were common knowledge. Hutchinson was the only Republican to lose a Senate seat that year.