Timing is everything, in politics as in so much of life. And the summer, when news often is in short supply, is the worst time for a lawmaker to even be suspected of getting caught with his pants down.

Timing was one of Sen. Larry E. Craig’s big mistakes — and he’s appeared to make many recently. Although the Idaho Republican got arrested in the Minneapolis airport men’s room sting operation in June, he didn’t file his disorderly conduct guilty plea at the Minneapolis courthouse until Aug. 8, so it was ripe to get leaked during the time on the media calendar known as “the silly season.” It’s those dog days of late August when Congress is in recess, the president is on vacation, the Supreme Court is dark and the media — cable TV news networks, especially — scrounge to fill air until Labor Day. They’ll jump on any juicy story with the enthusiasm of a kid doing a cannonball into the neighborhood pool.

Summer is clearly when congressional sex scandals have the most legs. In 1982, allegations of sex between pages and House members, which led to the censures of Republican Daniel B. Crane of Illinois and Democrat Gerry E. Studds of Massachusetts, caught fire over the July Fourth weekend. The relationship Rep. Barney Frank had with a male prostitute, which led to a reprimand for the Massachusetts Democrat, transfixed an otherwise-quiet Washington in August 1989. The details about, and public disdain for, Sen. Bob Packwood’s years as a serial sexual harasser had all of August 1995 to build, and the Oregon Republican resigned right after Labor Day. And Democratic Rep. Gary A. Condit of California was the most covered member of Congress in August 2001, when the nation obsessed about the disappearance of his former paramour Chandra Levy.

It’s gotten so that pundits such as the University of Virginia’s Larry J. Sabato refer to “the August doldrums factor,” in which scandals garner more media coverage, so reliably that salacious news about a political opponent is most often leaked then.

“Right now, the silly season is a double whammy,” agreed Rafael Lorente, a visiting journalism professor at the University of Maryland and a former Washington correspondent for the South Florida Sun-Sentinel. “You have the silly season of the recess and then that other silly season of the election calendar being out of control. Even though it’s an off year in Congress, it looks like the entire place is in election mode. Every seat matters.”

Some on the right argue that the Craig coverage has been so intense because of a liberal media bias. “Whenever there is a Republican scandal, it is portrayed by the media as a cataclysmic blow to the future of the GOP,” says L. Brent Bozell III, president of the conservative Media Research Center. But in the case of Democratic scandals — he cites as an example the corruption charges facing Rep. William J. Jefferson of Louisiana, who famously had $90,000 in cash in his freezer when FBI agents raided his Capitol Hill home — “a mantra kicks in among the media that it’s time to move on.”

Many on the left view it differently. They say White House efforts to put a positive spin on the situation in Iraq — in advance of Gen. David H. Petraeus’ report to Congress last week — received a disproportionate share of this summer’s silly season airtime. Republicans got upset, argues John Amato, editor of the popular left-leaning blog Crooksandliars.com, when it became “only two minutes for Petraeus and four minutes for Larry Craig on the news.”

But Ken Bode, a former NBC and CNN Washington reporter who now teaches journalism at Indiana’s DePauw University, said there were compelling reasons why the Craig story — and GOP Rep. Mark Foley of Florida’s salacious e-mails to House pages, which were leaked during silly season 2006 but not reported until fall — topped so many newscasts. “It’s the hypocrisy,” Bode said of the GOP.

The increasing availability of fresh audio and video helps keep any story alive on TV, especially if it’s a bit lurid. The leaked tape of Craig’s police interrogation kept the analysis, commentary and outrage about the senator’s conduct alive for several days. (So, too, did Craig’s own radical departure from the damage-control manual. He pleaded guilty to a crime, and said at a nationally televised news conference that he’s innocent. He announced his resignation, then had aides say he might stay in office if he could clear his name.)

But perhaps most of all, the Craig story slaked the media’s summertime thirst — especially because of its strange “six degrees of separation” quality. The news of Craig’s encounter with an undercover cop broke seven weeks after the news that another GOP senator, Louisiana’s David Vitter, was in the phone records of “D.C. Madam” Deborah Jeane Palfrey. And Vitter, in turn, had come to Congress in 1999 to succeed Robert L. Livingston, who rode out his own adultery scandal in comparative obscurity by resigning from the House, where he was about to become Speaker, before Hustler magazine went public with the allegations.

Timing was everything then, too. Livingston’s misbehavior came to light just days before Bill Clinton was impeached as an outgrowth of his own sexual transgressions — and in December.

Elizabeth Wasserman is a Washington freelance writer. She can be reached at ewasserman@cq.com.