Waiting for the circus to unfold this morning as General David Petraeus testifies before closed congressional committees ostensibly looking into the terroristic attack on the American mission in Benghazi, my mind races back years when I got into a drag-out fight in the newsroom I used to help manage.  Two of our reporters, egged on by a clueless line editor originally from out of state with little knowledge of Texas, wanted to do a story on one of the state’s most promising sons.  Our story would have taken him down Petraeus-like – a huge loss for a state that can produce the likes of an indicted John Connally, a discredited George W. Bush, a shameless Phil Gramm and the redoubtable Rick Perry.  Texas also can produce a Lyndon Johnson or an Ann Richards, so it does have the ability to generate the exceptional star, which this man was.

Listening to the two lay out the work they had already done without the knowledge of their editorial superiors I began to tremble with rage.  Not because they had not sought prior approval before embarking on their lark.  No, they were retelling a story I had known about for months and that I purposely never had brought up in any of our daily news meetings.  The story was not gossip.  It was unfortunately true.  But it had no bearing on the man’s committed service to the public.  The man was not a friend of mine. I knew him but we were not particularly close.

In the news business, constant were the times when individuals would take aside an assistant state editor or, later, an editorial page editor, and relate the sexual, financial or other failings of their real or perceived rivals.  I was told about a top college administrator who would sit naked in his backyard by the pool drinking and then act out his (or her) favorite passages from Shakespeare.  About innumerable state legislators who paid for sex.  About the alleged proclivities of a high state official and her reported liaison with other females.  Almost everyone told me which members of the legislature were gay and which lawmakers preferred blondes with bounteous bosoms.  On and on it went.  Some of these tattletales had pictures, dates and other sordid details.

The two reporters could not respond to how their lead paragraph would read.  “Well, we have not started writing yet,” one volunteered, “but he is being unfaithful to his wife.”  Half an hour of near-shouting had resolved nothing, so the discussion moved into the managing editor’s office where, having failed to regain my composure, I argued that we had a story that was only important, tragically so, to the man’s wife, whom we now would also trash in public.

“Are we really going to be this kind of newspaper?  Is that what we are about?”  At the time, the state was led in part by a trio of men, one whose penchant for women was prodigious.  “If we do this story, then we have to do a story on __(the man whose penchant for women was prodigious)___.  And while we are at it, we need also to do __________.  And, of course, you know about ___________.  Shouldn’t we do him?  Why didn’t you guys report on ___________?”  I was livid.  “Do you know how many stories like this we have in this very #*@#-ing newsroom!!??”

To this day, I cannot bear to watch scenes of paparazzi chasing their quarry, even unto death in a tunnel in Paris.  To me, personal lives are just that.

The managing editor saw it my way, and the editor of the paper later called me into his office to thank me for fighting and winning the fight.  Which brings me back to Petraeus.  We do not know everything about this national disaster, and it might still be that the general trifled with national security.  And the story is sure to expand outwards and upwards to others.  Perhaps it will prove beneficial in the long run.  But if only a craven rival or some other politically motivated loon conspired to bring down a man whom everyone says is an exceptional public servant, then they must pay the price Petreaus paid.  And, of course, it brings up the larger question: Why, o, why would we do this to ourselves?  We can do without the likes of a John Edwards.  Not so with men and women with the abilities of David Petraeus.

I feel great sympathy for Holly Petraeus, who herself serves the public.  We have all experienced betrayal.  It is sad, sad, sad.  But today’s society will not help her much.  There are fewer controls these days to limit how these scandals that ricochet painfully through actual human beings then crash through from the confines of personal lives to damage an entire nation and compound the hurt.  And then we all become part of the tragedy.

Long before the advent of the Internet, the phrase Age of Information was in high vogue.  I warned another editor that the Age of Information would also be the Age of Disinformation, when information would be invented and when even accurate information that had no business being made public would be thoughtlessly made known.

I had only a scant clue of a future that indeed is proving reckless with itself.

Jesse Treviño is the former editorial page editor of The Austin American-Statesman.