As Barro points out, this is a weird analysis. Do most former Marines and/or ordinary Americans sext with people who aren’t their wives? I guess I hope not, but I don’t have the stats in front of me.

More to the point, as the sister of a former Marine sniper platoon commander, I know my brother wouldn’t accept this kind of garbage logic either. He’d accept imperfection in the men he led because that’s what leaders do, but he’d argue that being a Marine creates a higher standard for moral behavior, not a lower one. And that should be true of Marines post-service and Marines running for public office to boot.

But Barro’s point about conscientiousness and executive function in this article should get more attention in these debates. If you’re running for public office, sexting people who aren’t your wife and not doing basic due diligence to clean up your social media presence (these are not morally equivalent failures, fwiw) should be pretty clear indicators that you’re not the kind of person who is conscientious in other areas of your life. You might be the kind of person who sees ethics rules as rules-ish or who is willing to take a free trip to a private island with a bunch of teenage girls. Some voters will be willing to overlook that because you have great policy positions or (more likely) because you’re better than some other terrible alternative, but this is not leadership in a meaningful way.

And a lack of both conscientiousness and executive function doesn’t bode well for how someone will handle conflicts of interest, public resources, and confidential and/or national security information in a leadership role. (Not to be too pointed, but we’re seeing exactly how this plays out right now.) The primary question we should be asking about candidates is not “did this person cheat on his wife?” but instead “what do this person’s past actions overall tell me about their approach to the critical issues Senators have to weigh in on?” On that metric, some kinds of cheating will matter more than others and other behaviors will tell us more than sexual scandals will about how well and how seriously a candidate is taking the responsibilities of public office. That’s the debate we should be having.