They wrinkle their brow and their eyes look away for a moment and then focus back on you. Then they say this: What was he DOING? What was he THINKING?

New York is a city full of practical people. They measure things in numbers. When someone does something stupid, awful, unacceptable, take your pick, they always assume the reason is connected to faulty cognitive abilities.

Of course, I’m talking about Governor Spitzer. Was he stupid? Not at all.

He was, is, a very bright man, quick, and certainly well educated, Princeton, Harvard. His brain worked fine.

But so much of life is inner, personal, and is governed and determined not by the way your brain works but how your emotions work. I think that’s what got him in trouble and caused his fall. (Let me posit without going into what is, to me, obvious: Spitzer committed this series of sins because he is human and, by definition, damaged. We are all complicated little pirates. The best are a mess. Great Popes go to regular confession, and the best of them have a lot to say.)

In the area of emotions I see two possibilities.

1. Spitzer was, deep inside him, utterly self-destructive. He wanted to bring himself down. He had a hungry animal inside him whose great desire was to kill Eliot. Maybe he knew this and maybe not; maybe he couldn’t control it. But he wanted to do something terrible to make himself suffer. That’s why he did something so dangerous, something that yelled "Catch me!” He left a money trail. He went to hotels where his face would be recognized. And he became part of a world that he, in his professional life, prosecuted and moved against. Someone once said of gamblers — he was a long-time compulsive gambler, and he was asked why gamblers did it — he said, "All gamblers are looking to lose." Getting caught, losing everything — this terrifies them and gives them pleasure. “I’m feeling terror — I must be alive.” It gives them a problem they can focus on and try to solve. This is in contrast to most of the problems in life, which are intractable, impervious to our efforts, and in the end, boring. Anyway, it’s not rational to operate this way — it has to do with emotions, desires, the murky needs of the psyche.

2. He was not utterly self-destructive. He was arrogant. He thought he was bullet proof. He looked in the mirror and thought: I am looking at God’s other son. He thought he was Elliott Ness – “I am the good man, the avenger.” He looked down on those he prosecuted — they are low life, low class. He is not low class. He is all class. He is right to crack down on crime. But, he himself can afford to indulge in a little criminal activity because it’s not as if it will ruin him because he’s…God’s other son.

(I realize it’s presumptuous to try to imagine someone’s inner life, or to inspect it in this way, but in this case it’s hard not to speculate.)

So, those are thoughts on what drove his actions. My extremely informal polling of a very small control group tells me most New Yorkers think what drove him was reason number two. I think it was number two, plus number one.

Stray thoughts. I have never, ever, seen an elected official as unpopular as Eliot Spitzer. I’ve seen political operatives this unpopular, but never one elected by the people. There was absolutely no — none — sadness about Spitzer’s downfall in New York. The New York Post said they cheered on the trading floors of great investment houses. But it wasn’t just them. People on the street, in the stores, cab drivers — they all thought he got what was coming to him! What did he do to become so disliked? He pushed people around, and in a crude and gleeful way. He said terrible things to them and it wound up in the press. He told this guy he’d drive a stake through his heart. He told the other guy he’d ruin him. He started a dirty and highly personal campaign against a political opponent in Albany and it broke into the papers. He seemed like the mean-minded bully everyone has met up with at least a few times in life. It all filtered down to people on the streets, through the press. And everyone thought: Yeah, he looks like a guy who acts like that. People don’t like mean-minded bullies. They just don’t.

What should this talented, experienced man do now? I’ve been thinking all day of John Profumo. Profumo, the British Defense Minister in the 1960’s, was revealed to have cavorted with prostitutes, one of whom was also involved with a Russian naval attache. As my New York friends say, this was poor thinking! It was the height of the Cold War. When the case became public, Profumo made another mistake. He misled his own government about the facts. His prime minister went before the House of Commons and declared that Profumo was not guilty. When it became clear that this was untrue, the entire government fell.

No one was ever ruined the way Profumo was ruined. But he had one thing — a wonderful wife, a strong true woman who knew what was important. She was a beautiful former actress, Valerie Hobson. And she worked with the poor. Do you know what Profumo did? He went to work with her. He took all his managerial skills and his first-class brain and he used them to help people in trouble. He worked cleaning toilets in a charity called Toynbee Hall, in London’s East End. He did this — modestly, quietly, keeping his head down — for 40 years. At the end, he’d graduated to chief fundraiser for Toynbee. He did great work. And at the end, he was awarded a CBE by the Queen. Not that he seems to have cared especially, as his values had changed.

I hope Spitzer goes Profumo’s Way. I hope he follows his emotions toward something helpful. Also, a lot of therapy might be good.