Guys, won’t you learn from experience? Tim Mahoney won his US Congressional seat after Mark Foley, the previous representative from the district in Florida, resigned. Why? The bachelor Foley had sent sexually explicit emails to congressional pages, teenage boys. Sex scandal!

Now Mahoney, 52, who came to office two years ago with the campaign slogan “Restoring America’s values begins at home,” has admitted to sexual affairs (plural), and a payoff to a former mistress.

Mahoney, who lives in Palm Beach Gardens, is, unlike Foley, married. And, although his wife, Terry, stood by him a week ago as he admitted that he had created “pain” in his marriage, she now, no surprise, wants a divorce.

Mahoney admitted paying a campaign worker and former mistress, Patricia Allen, and her lawyer $121,903 to prevent a lawsuit over sexual harassment. A second relationship was also charged: Mahoney had an affair with a Florida woman who came to Washington to get FEMA aid for a 2004 hurricane. She got a $3.4 million federal grant.

Since Tim and Terry Mahoney have been married for 22 years, and he was a wealthy venture capitalist and computer marketer before he was a Congressman, and they have a daughter, Bailey, in college, and he has already admitted to adultery, and she campaigned hard for him when he sought election, Terry would presumably get a generous settlement.

For one thing, her court papers say, obviously referring to the $121,903 payoff, Tim Mahoney “recently sold jointly owned real property,” put the proceeds into his own account, and “dissipated funds from said account.”

Those were marital assets. Her divorce petition says that she is “in need of temporary, lump sum, rehabilitative and permanent periodic alimony, which the husband is well able to provide for.”

Rep. Mahoney lists his net worth as between $3 million and $12.7 million.

He's come a long way since his days as Jeff Spicoli in "Fast Times At Ridgemont High" and his first marriage to Madonna. But Sean Penn is back in the tabloids.

The actor and his actress wife Robin Wright Penn are getting a divorce. As celebrity marriages go, this one lasted quite a long time — 11 years. There aren't any details of the split circulating yet, but you can bet there will be eventually. Will this one become the first celebrity mess of 2008, or will it be handled gracefully? Who gets what? What was in their prenup?

New year on the way in a few days, but same old celebrity divorce questions to ponder.

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Now, on the surface, it doesn't sound like she's really doling out any earth-shattering revelations. But she has a lot of common sense tips she can offer about everything from financial management and the legal process to post-divorce privacy issues. In fact, she even goes by an alias — Samantha Woods.

Apparently her divorce was messy and expensive, so she's got a pretty good idea of the worst of what you might encounter. She doesn't want her ex knowing what she's doing now with her consulting business, hence the pseudonym. In the digital age, that's actually something a lot of people might be interested in. If you don't want your ex finding you or tracking your activities, there are steps you can take.

But to me, the most encouraging thing about Woods is the example she sets for what your life can be like after your divorce. We talk a lot here at FWW about the various phases of divorce, and you get a pretty clear picture of that when you look at Woods. She had a phase of her life when she was married at a young age and raised kids. Then she had a phase where she navigated the breakup of her marriage. And now her marriage is over and she's become an entrepreneur.

It's nice to see an example proving things can change for the better during and after a divorce, even if it's tough to see the forest through the trees at the time.

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Those of you who caught CBS's "60 Minutes" on Sunday were witness to just such a demonstration from French President Nicolas Sarkozy when he abruptly excused himself from an interview with (the fabulous) Lesley Stahl after she broached the issue of his wife and her recent departure from the world stage.

At the time of the interview, wife Cécilia Sarkozy hadn't been seen since July and rumors abounded over the fate of the presidential marriage. Two weeks later, Sarkozy's office announced it was over.

"If I had to say something about Cécilia, I would certainly not do so here," Sarkozy coldly informed Stahl before stripping off his microphone.

"What was unfair?" Stahl pleaded.

"Au revoir, merci et bon courage (Good-bye, thank-you and good luck)," Sarkozy said on his way out.

This isn't the first time Sarkozy's lost his cool over Cécilia. A French journalist who asked about the marriage at a press conference was denounced straight away for the media's "inelegance" in pursuing the matter.

Still, other than the occasional outburst, there is "no evidence that the end of Cécilia is affecting [Sarkozy's] passion and drive in his work," says Stahl. So, while politicians may not be immune to the stress of divorce, it doesn't seem to be any match for their personal ambition and acute narcissism.

Larry David saw opportunity to turn his divorce into comedy gold.

In June, Larry and his wife Laurie separated, citing irreconcilable differences after 14 years of marriage.

The Davids' spokesman has stated that their split was "very amicable".

Sunday night, on Larry's hit show Curb Your Enthusiasm, his on-screen wife announced she was going to leave him.

The show split was slightly less friendly, with his fictitious wife calling her husband in fear for her life due to a potential plane crash, only to be told to call back in ten minutes while the cable man fixes the Tivo.

When David's on screen wife returns safely, she announces she'll be leaving him. The rest of the show dealt with friends of the couple choosing sides, some of them being Larry and Laurie's real friends.

Larry David has always stated that his show persona is something like a funhouse-mirror version of himself, the person he might be if he had "no manners or restraint."

Lucky for Laurie — in that case — that her former husband isn't as insensitive as he appears onscreen.

It's a difficult thing to find the humor in divorce, but I would say anyone could watch that show and find something to laugh about, including Mr. David.

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Divorce is not a simple process for anyone, but it can take a really long time if you're rich. That's pretty much the main point to pull out of the latest story on pro golfer Greg Norman's divorce.

Now, we've written about this before. But just in case you're new to the story, Greg and his ex-wife Laura Theresa Andrassy are scheduled for another hearing in early November. They're still haggling over who will end up with the tax liability for one of their jets. Yes, that's jets, plural.

And then Laura's attorneys are going to try to make Greg pay her more money because he's been dragging his feet on coughing up the cash he's supposed to give her. As if he's really going to notice it when he finally does pay her. Let's be honest, though. Laura hasn't exactly been destitute, unless you ignore the $725,000 Greg gave her that she and her attorneys burned as they worked out the details of the settlement.

One day I hope I have money problems like these.

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Here’s another story that shows things aren’t always so rosy in religious families. We’ve written a couple of times about the mis-matched ministers, Juanita Bynum and Thomas Weeks.

Well, here’s a story out of Alabama about a pastor whose wife walked out on him and their two kids six months ago. Actually, according to a report in the Mobile Press-Register, Beth Smith is still seeing her children on a regular basis, and sources say she is a good mother.

But in March, she hocked her wedding ring while attending a religious convention in Louisiana and bought a bus ticket to New York without telling her family anything. To say the least, details like that make her sound unstable. She was living in a women’s shelter in New York when authorities finally located her in July and brought her back to Alabama.

Her husband, Rev. Jason Lee Smith, has filed for divorce and it seeking custody of the kids, who are 10 and 7. Beth Smith’s attorney said there was conflict in the marriage and that the couple had grown apart. And he talked about the toll that keeping up appearances can take when you’re married to a religious leader. Indeed, if you start to question the life you’re living, that’s a difficult place to be. But walking out on your family? She’s going to have a tough time explaining that away.

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USFSPA, enacted in 1982, allows state courts to divide military retirement as property in divorce settlements. For example, ex-spouses married for 20 years or more can be awarded up to 50% of the former spouses pension for life, or until they remarry. If there were child support or alimony court orders, the ex could enjoy as much as 65% of the military pension.

Congress intended to protect former spouses — chiefly women — from being "dumped." It was thought military wives could not easily establish careers and work on their own retirement, since they moved frequently due to thier husband's military career. Times have changed now, and military wives can work and earn pensions.

USFSPA gives state courts authority to distribute retirement pay, classified as both property and income. Spouses often end up with a substantial share of the ex's retirement. This is especially true in the case of short-term marriages.

Some of the proposed reforms include:

It’s not often that you see stories of flat-out, honest-to-goodness deception. But here’s one of them. A woman in England got swindled out of her divorce settlement by nothing more than a few very transparent lies, and now the guy responsible is headed to jail.

Britain’s Plymouth Herald reports that Pervez Alvi, a bankrupt businessman, convinced Anne Gale to give him nearly half of her divorce settlement (about $200,000) so he could lease three pubs that the two of them and their significant others would run. Gale, who eventually remarried, didn't figure out that Alvi was stringing her along until it was too late. Alvi asked her for a check and told her to leave the payee line blank. And she actually complied. So Alvi just dumped the funds into an account in his wife’s name. And by the time Gale realized what was happening, most of the money was gone.

I’m not sure which one of them deserves more of my disdain. The guy is obviously a creep. And she did something extremely foolish. Here are words to live by: When you’re writing a check for a large sum of money (I do that every day, don’t you?) you probably want to fill the whole thing in yourself. Fortunately, the court is going to make Alvi pay it all back. And he’s going to spend 18 months in jail. It’s nice to see justice served.

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There’s more news out of Pittsburgh in the saga of billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife’s divorce and his battle with the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

A judge this week refused to order the Post-Gazette to return previously sealed documents related to Scaife’s messy divorce from his wife, Margaret Ritchie Battle Scaife. It’s a fun story from the standpoint of the First Amendment implications, but also because Scaife owns the rival newspaper in Pittsburgh, the Tribune-Review.

Scaife’s attorneys argued that the only reason the Post-Gazette obtained the documents was due to an error that made them publicly available on the Web for a few days in August. Prior to that, the papers had been sealed by the court. But the judge declined to hold the Post-Gazette responsible for a computer mistake made by Allegheny County prothonotary's office.

Indeed, the documents were available to anyone who might have gone looking for them during that time. As luck would have it, the Post-Gazette had a reporter doing what all good reporters do: poking around.

So it’s a win for the Post-Gazette and the First Amendment. Scaife is well known as a supporter of conservative causes, so he’s squarely in public figure territory. But there’s still no word on how the divorce is shaking out. According to the documents, there’s custody of a dog hanging in the balance. Obviously we can count on the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette to keep us informed.

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