A certain amount of foofaraw came about when FBI bigshots Peter Strzok and Lisa Page were caught sending Trump-hating text-messages while in the throes of an extramarital affair.

And rightly, most of the attention went to the pair's illegal use of government property and underhanded Borgia-style machinations against the incoming U.S. president.

But their openly out there extramarital affair is worth noting, too. Under FBI regulations, adulterous affairs are a firing offense, given that such behavior puts national security at risk and automatically leads to the loss of one's security clearance. There's a lot of this going on at that troubled wokester agency now that a new lovebird case has emerged in the bust of FBI counterintelligence chief Charles McGonigal, yet nobody seems to be stopping it.

Sure enough, an angry mistress has emerged in McGonigal's case and she was reportedly instrumental in exposing his influence-peddling on behalf of a sanctioned Russian oligarch.

So once again, it makes sense that the rules are there, given that someone who can't keep a personal vow probably wouldn't be inclined to remain loyal to his country, or its democratically elected leader, either.

And let's not forget that it also makes the bureau a figure of fun.

Remember this exchange between lovebird Strzok and Rep. Louie Gohmert of Texas?

"I've talked to FBI agents around the country," he said. "You've embarrassed them. You've embarrassed yourself. I can't help but wonder when I see you looking there, with a little smirk, how many times did you look so innocent into your wife's eye and lie to her about Lisa —" Gohmert was then cut off by the howls from Democratic members, which included one encouraging Gohmert to take "medication." The audible interjection from Democrats was a rare breach of decorum within the formality of Congress.

LOL. Good old Louie. Always thinking what the regular guys are thinking.

Which brings us to McGonigal, the now-indicted former FBI counterintelligence chief who was arrested last week in New York for influence-peddling on behalf of sanctioned Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska.

Sure enough, he too, was having an extramarital affair and it came back to bite him. He took a mistress while ensconced as FBI counterintelligence chief, and once he dumped her, she took to drinking and didn't take it well.

According to Business Insider, as summed up by the Daily Beast:

The angry ex-lover of the FBI’s former New York counterintelligence chief claims she tipped the feds off to some of his misdeeds before his arrest last week. Charles McGonigal, who was part of the FBI probe of the Trump campaign’s Russia ties, has been charged with money laundering, lying to the FBI, and taking money to help a sanctioned Russian oligarch, among others. In an interview with Insider, Allison Guerriero said she dated McGonigal for a year, unaware he was married. He spent far more lavishly than an FBI salary would typically allow, she recalled, and she once found a bag of cash in his apartment. But after their fling ended, he revealed he was married and had no plans to leave his wife. She said she was so angry that, after a bout of drinking, she emailed his boss to disclose the affair as well as extensive dealings she’d noticed McGonigal had in Albania. It’s unclear what came of the email but the feds turned up on her doorstep three years later to ask her about McGonigal and some of her allegations regarding Albania appeared in last week’s indictment.

 Her behavior for a time while under the influence of alcohol was, to put it politely, uncontrolled, payback-minded, and she admitted to harassing McGonigal's wife as well as reporting his activities to the people she thought would hear her out, which it turns out was the FBI itself. For undisclosed reasons, her complaint took a long time to verify but she was right on the money. Perhaps if they hadn't eventually acted, she would have found someone else to tell, because she wanted revenge for her ill treatment. This, by the way, is pretty common in espionage cases. Just look up the case of the Walker-Whitworth spy ring from the 1980s. That's why the rule about no extramarital affairs is actually there.

I won't go into the details of the actual influence-peddling charges themselves that McGonigal is accused of, which are deeply interesting and require their own blog. There is great reporting from Dan Bongino, Margot Cleveland and Insider's Mattathias Schwartz, to check on that, but just the fact that the bureau seems to have fallen down on its standards about extramarital affairs is pretty noteworthy.

That there are so many such cases in the increasingly frequent panoply of FBI scandals suggests that they seem to have a flaming swinger culture over there, with none of them inclined to keep their marital vows, at least based on what turns up in the news. Are they all like that? Does Christopher Wray get a little on the side, too? How is it this kind of culture can continue in such a widespread way yet nobody gets sanctioned?

Yes, it does matter for national security, regardless of the leftist claim that "it's just sex." So many bad cases now from the FBI have a mistress in the background.

And speaking of swingers, remember that the FBI agent in charge of the phony Gretchen Whitmer kidnapping case in Michigan, where a lot of backwoods characters were enticed into a kidnapping plot they would not have gotten involved with otherwise, was a full-blown swinger, and wife-beater to boot. That case fell apart in no small part based on that agent's personal behavior.

That's some culture they've got there at the FBI, and they have got to enforce their rules or see more and more cases like McGonigal's. Not tolerating this stuff might have kept McGonigal from getting involved in the nefarious oligarch activity he got involved in just by keeping him honest. He wasn't, he engaged in a lot of this stuff he wasn't supposed to, he thumbed his nose at the rules because nobody enforced them, and it didn't take long for him to soon be sneaking around with the minions of a Russian oligarch for big money.

Needless to say, adultery tends to be a leftist value if not a completely leftist practice. Leftists will say it's "just sex" as they did during the Clinton era and excuse all kinds of bad personal sexual behavior that never was tolerated in the past, and does run counter to the established rules. Conservatives will, on paper at least, say it's not right even if some personally fall short.

With all the talk about breaking up or abolishing the FBI, it's obvious the agency needs some kind of hosing out. With so many open adultery cases going on at the bureau, it might be that just enforcing the adultery rules alone might be the most effective way of getting the least loyal, least-law-minded, and least rule-minded agents out of there. That might be the quickest way to clear the left's plotters, fabricators, and traitors out.

Image: Charles J. Sharp, via Wikimedia Commons // CC BY-SA 4.0