The real wonder of the Mark Foley scandal may be how it stayed under wraps for so long. As the story continued to pick up momentum yesterday, Capitol Hill journalists came out of the woodwork to declare that they, too, knew that the Florida Republican had a reputation for coming on to teenage Congressional pages. One D.C. reporter recounted getting a number of email printouts from a source in May—the same messages that eventually brought about Foley's downfall after they turned up last week on an anonymous blog called Stop Sex Predators. The reporter said she found the emails "inappropriate and a little bit creepy," but not newsworthy enough to get her editor's support for a full-blown investigation.

"He said, 'Do some reporting, see what you can get, but I'm not into this,'" she recalls. Part of the problem was that the page's name and his responses were redacted from the printout, making it difficult to determine his identity or assess to what extent he had been an active participant in the flirtation rather than a passive victim.

Of course, notes the reporter, evidence of this particular Congressman hitting on a teenage boy was not as shocking to a Washington insider as one might expect. "He's always had a reputation of hitting on young guys—legal-age young guys, that is," she says. "It seemed believable to me."

This reporter wasn't the only one in Washington who knew about Foley's activities but didn't think them worthy of column inches. Several weeks after getting the printouts from her source, she says, a colleague from a major national news organization passed her another set of copies, telling her he couldn't write about them for his outlet. "I said, 'I've already got the emails, and from what I know, other people have them, too,'" she says.

Granted, not every D.C. journo was in on the story. Amy Argetsinger, who works on the Washington Post's Reliable Source column, says she had no inkling of what Foley was up to. "This is above my pay grade," she says. "That's the big irony of doing a gossip column in Washington—when there's a really big story like this going on, it's covered by Pulitzer winners." Chuck Babington, who has been covering the scandal for the Post since it broke on ABC's website, said he had no advance knowledge of the emails: "If I'd known about it, I would've put it in the paper."

Nor did everyone on the beat know Foley was gay. Back in July 1995, Sallie Motsch wrote a piece for Washingtonian magazine titled "How to Date a Congressman." In the story, Motsch details her dates with several bachelors on Capitol Hill, including Foley, whom she met for a glass of Merlot at D.C. power boite Le Mistral. "This congressman is a blast of exuberance," wrote Motsch, betraying not a bit of gaydar. "Tall and solid with sparkling blue eyes and subtly coiffed hair, his wire-framed glasses lend authority to his round face. Impeccably tailored in a Prince Charles plaid Joseph Abboud suit and a French blue shirt, he's got a real Palm Beach polish...."

Eat your heart out, Jeffrey Epstein.