"Lord, make me a Christian -- but not yet." -- St. Augustine of Hippo

Nothing makes us laugh louder or harder than the spectacle of a fellow hypocrite getting his comeuppance. No one laughed harder than I did during South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford's almost-too-painful-to-watch confession of an affair with a woman from Argentina.

Mark Sanford is yet another in a long line of Republican moralists who should check their own zippers before inveighing too loudly about the sexual sins of others. You'd think someone who invokes the Scriptures as much as Mr. Sanford does would remember that one of Jesus' most troubling promises was that we will all be judged by the standards we glibly apply to others: "And why do you look at the speck that is in your brother's eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye?"

During his days as a holy zealot in the House of Representatives, Mr. Sanford didn't mince words about specks or logs belonging to President Bill Clinton during the Lewinsky affair. Because of Mr. Clinton's lying and obvious depravity, he insists he felt "comfortable" voting for impeachment: "I think what he [Clinton] did in this matter was reprehensible," he said. "In politics you can get away with anything as long as it's what's expected. If people expect you to be a rascal, you can be a rascal," Mr. Sanford told The Boston Globe in 1998, thus establishing a standard he, too, would be judged by 11 years later.

Standing in a room full of gawkers making his confession, Mark Sanford shared the pain in his heart while throwing in a little dour exegesis about God's law: "But I guess where I'm trying to go with this is that there are moral absolutes, and that God's law indeed is there to protect you from yourself. And there are consequences if you breach that. This press conference is a consequence."

"Oh, marital infidelity," Jon Stewart, the secular saint of Comedy Central, quipped about Sanford's predicament later that night. "[You're] just another politician with a conservative mind and a liberal penis."

It was impossible not to laugh. I suspect millions did. If we're lucky, it was one of those hollow laughs tempered by our knowledge of our own vulnerability to charges of hypocrisy -- if not in that area, in so many other ways we humans fail to live up to even our own ideals, much less God's.

As a fellow Christian with plenty of clay squishing between my own toes, I'm all too aware that guffaws over sexual hypocrisy and seemingly outdated notions like "sin" define our modernity. It is uncomfortable entering "the dark night of the soul" to confront our spiritual brokeness. Given a choice, most of us would rather be executed on live television than stand at a podium and admit our wrongdoing.

Mr. Sanford refused to call what he did "an error in judgment," as so many do. The news conference, with its appeal to biblical standards that he violated every step of the way, sounded weird to our ears. "I've been unfaithful to my wife," he said boldly before settling into a slightly off-kilter groove. "I developed a relationship with a -- which started out as a dear, dear friend from Argentina. It began very innocently, as I suspect many of these things do, in just a casual e-mail back and forth ..." Sure, it was too much information, but it was fascinating.

Democrats Eliot Spitzer, John Edwards and Jim McGreevey also mixed passive constructions with genuine mumbles of contrition, but they weren't as "cathartic" or interesting as Sanford. Republicans Newt Gingrich, Larry Craig, David Vitter, Mark Foley, John Ensign and the conservative evangelical pastor Ted Haggard never stopped spinning during their press conferences. Their Christianity and lawyerly repentance sounded like the clang of ideological armor.

In "The Devil's Dictionary," the great 19th-century American satirist Ambrose Bierce defined a Christian as "someone who believes the New Testament is a divinely inspired book admirably suited to the spiritual needs of his neighbor. One who follows the teachings of Christ in so far as they are not inconsistent with a life of sin."

By the time I caught Keith Olbermann's dramatic, but mocking, reading of excerpts of the e-mails Sanford sent to his Argentinian paramour "Maria" later that evening, I was hyper-conscious of my own hypocrisy. What gave me the right to laugh so heartily at Mark Sanford's expense? Where was my empathy?

Slowly, I tried to pull the log from my own eye, but it kept breaking up into even tinier splinters.