The Weiner Tragedy

Just six years ago, Anthony Weiner seemed to have it all: a career as a veteran congressman, a highly regarded wife and an excellent chance to be elected mayor of New York. Then he lost it all — and more. He’s now too pathetic to even be a laughingstock: a confessed felon who has to register as a sex offender, headed for divorce and prison.

It’s a classic tragedy: a man of considerable talent brought low by his own flaws. As he tearfully admitted Friday in Manhattan Federal Court, he has no one to blame but himself and his “destructive impulses.”

Weiner pleaded guilty to exchanging sexually explicit online messages, including violent rape fantasies, last year with a teen girl he knew to be underage.

The crime was a new low for him, but also the third time he’d been caught (and tearfully apologized) since 2011.

In Rounds One and Two, he pleaded for forgiveness, got it from many, truly believed his career could be revived — and then went searching for new sexting partners.

It is, as he admitted, “a sickness,” though that hardly excuses his sleazy behavior. He’ll likely get a well-deserved 21 to 27 months behind bars at sentencing in September.

In Round Three, Weiner’s self-created mess moved beyond fodder for comedians and headline writers: No amount of arrogance can explain how he kept on risking fresh national humiliation. There’s a deep, sick compulsion at work here.

That’s why his courtroom tears, though doubtless honest, ring so hollow.

In retrospect, a few warning signs of his weirdness are clear in his erratic public performances, regularly snarking at political foes and memorable screeching fits on the floor of the House of Representatives. Yet it was by chance that he first got caught, a mistweet that revealed his habit of sending lewd photos of himself to strange women.

Suffice it to say that New Yorkers dodged a real bullet with his downfall. Adios, Carlos Danger.