This spring it was Eliot Spitzer. Now it’s Tim Mahoney. When are politicians that can’t keep it in their pants going to stop running their campaigns around ethics reform? Sure the whole “I’m such a good guy” shtick is effective when it comes to scooping up gullible voters, but getting caught hitting it raw with a hooker or firing your two-for-the-price-of-one mistress/employee really puts a dent in voter confidence.

Mahoney, a congressman from Florida educated at WVU and George Washington, has agreed to pay his former employee and alleged mistress Patricia Allen $121,000 after she claimed that he fired her when she ended their affair.

ABC News reports:

West Palm Beach Congressman Tim Mahoney (D-FL), whose predecessor resigned in the wake of a sex scandal, agreed to a $121,000 payment to a former mistress who worked on his staff and was threatening to sue him, according to current and former members of his staff who have been briefed on the settlement, which involved Mahoney and his campaign committee…

"You work at my pleasure," Congressman Mahoney told Allen on a January 20, 2008 telephone call that was recorded and played for Mahoney staffers. ABC News was provided a copy. Click here to hear the tape.

"If you do the job that I think you should do, you get to keep your job. Whenever I don't feel like you're doing your job, then you lose your job," Mahoney can be heard telling Allen.

"And guess what? The only person that matters is guess who? Me. You understand that. That is how life really is. That is how it works," Mahoney says on the call.

Um, can we say solipsistic? Okay so it is actually difficult to pronounce, but the point is, there’s some seriously demented ego happening in West Palm Beach with Tim “You work at my pleasure” Mahoney. It’s difficult to say which is worst, that he had the affair, that he fired his mistress, or the bit when he says that the only person that matters is himself.