Take it easy on Tiger Woods, who sold us the image of a morally correct family man while he was secretly enjoying an extra-curricular lifestyle that Hugh Hefner might have envied.
Don't be too hard on Mark Sanford, the married governor of South Carolina, who was so quick to condemn President Bill Clinton for that salacious blue dress incident, but then hopped on a plane at taxpayer expense to visit his mistress in Argentina.
And show some pity for those car company CEOs who flew to Washington last fall in their private jets, even while they were demanding huge pay cuts from their workers and big handouts from the government.
The powerful among us, new research says, can't help themselves.
"No human being can withstand the lure of it, not even the Gandhis and Mother Teresas of the world," argues Adam Galinsky, professor of ethics at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, who has been studying the effects of power for 10 years.
"Even though there are more eyes on the powerful, and they are being watched by more people, they psychologically feel invisible."
And people who feel their actions are hidden from others, Dr. Galinsky explains, lose the ethical boundaries of society. "We become sort of unbridled epicureans, trying to monstrously satisfy our basest desires."
In other words, the Gollums of the boardroom.
For those unschooled in The Lord of the Rings, Gollum was the creature who found a powerful ring that literally made him invisible, and eventually turned him twisted and evil. "Power is like that ring," says Dr. Galinsky, clearly a Tolkien fan.
Dr. Galinsky and a team of researchers conducted a series of experiments, to be published this spring in the journal Psychological Science, in which participants were assigned roles with different power levels - prime minister or civil servants. They were then asked to resolve moral dilemmas such as breaking traffic rules or returning a stolen bike.
In one experiment, the "powerful" participants condemned the cheating of others even while cheating more themselves. They were more likely to be critical of over-reporting travel expenses - but when locked alone in a room and given the chance to cheat on a dice game, the powerful people were more likely to report higher winnings then their less powerful counterparts.
In three other experiments, the results were the same: Powerful people judged others more harshly for failing to return the bike, or for not paying taxes, while being more likely to excuse the same behaviour for themselves.
In contrast, people in the lower power positions were more likely to be hard on themselves than others.
Dr. Galinsky isn't surprised by the results - it proves, he says, the old saying: Absolute power corrupts absolutely.
A decade of experiments has shown, he says, that even if people find their way to power honestly, and by understanding the perspective of others, those traits are inevitably eroded the less they feel people are monitoring them.
"It's very difficult to punish people above you," Dr. Galinsky says. And the truly powerful don't have much incentive to be guided by social norms, to feel the guilt or shame from the group. "They can meet their needs without relying on other people."
And it's also why they are so shocked by the visceral reaction to their own hypocrisy - like those CEOs who seemed surprised that their private jets might reap the scorn of a recession-ravaged country.
"The human mind is a powerful rationalization machine," Dr Galinsky says. So the powerful say: I need to do this to protect myself or project a certain image or help my company - and they believe it.
But Dr. Galinsky's research also makes clear that all those Gollums need a strong, watchful Gandalf - a board of directors, watchful media, a critical public - to keep them from feeling invisible. And it also means, he says, that society needs to think more deliberately about what kinds of people it brings to power, perhaps stressing a strong sense of ethics over other skills.
"People in power," he says, "act more like themselves; their true personality emerges."
And maybe they can't help that, either. But as Tiger Woods learned so painfully, even when you feel invisible, eventually someone finds the shadow you leave behind.
Erin Anderssen