The WaPo Washington Times has an op ed posted this morning demanding Speaker Hasterts resignation.

Sister Toldjah asks:  Should he?

I will take it a step farther and challenge the premise on its foundation.  I see nothing the Speaker has done or has not done to justify this, unless it is just for the partisan advantage of the Democrats.

Why?  Because at this point and according to the information at hand, the Speaker only knew about the emails, not the Instant messages.

The emails are important because unless they are validated at a server level then remain the only proof of this incident aside from Foley’s public acknowledgment, and at their foundation they are harmless.

According to this sidebar at MSNBC:

Federal officials familiar with the very early assessment of the Mark Foley e-mails say that at this point, there's no clear indication that federal laws were violated.

The law that might be involved is the prohibition on "enticement," which makes it a crime to use any interstate means of communication to entice minors to engage in any sexual act.  But it as a relatively high threshold for prosecution -- the communication must explicitly propose a sexual act.  The initial assessment, and it's a very early read, is that none of the e-mails that have been made public meet that test.

The emails prove nothing.  They are harmless, if borderline overly friendly.

Hastert had knowledge of them and took appropriate action based on their content:

Hastert, who did not take questions from reporters, called on any person who was aware of the 2003 instant messages to speak to law enforcement authorities. He said no Republican leader in Congress was aware of those exchanges until Friday, when ABC News reported it had questioned Foley about them.

Leadership officials had been aware since last year of the 2005 e-mail exchange, which they described as "overly friendly" but did not include overtly sexual references. They said they did not follow up on them other than to instruct Foley to not communicate with the Louisiana page.

Ok, schools and guns are supposed to be a no brainer.  No guns.  Zero Tolerance.  We suspend a 5 year old who brings in a GI Joe pistol the size of a quarter.  Well done.

And yet, despite out rules, look what has happened lately?

Enough?  Not hardly.  Also in the last 10 years (domestic only,  source Wikipedia):

When the news first broke I insisted on taking a wait and see attitude because something just didn't seem right about it, and too much info was second hand and unsupported.

Granted the guy resigned, which leads one to assume guilt, but scandal and guilt are not always connected.  So did he bail to avoid a deeper scandal or out of shame?  Only he knows. 

Let me stop for a minute and say without qualification that if the allegations are true, he needs help.  A 50 something guys should not be flirting around with a 16/17 year old kid.  Not to mention that as an elected official, and the kid a page this is a classic case of conflict of interest and abuse of position even in the best of circumstances.

It is also a representation of the predatory culture that crosses all boundaries, with the only common element the ease of access the Internet provides.

Let's unravel it.  What first broke was a claim that he had sent several emails to a former page too personal to a

Sixteen-Year-Old Who Worked as Capitol Hill Page Concerned About E-mail Exchange with Congressman

A 16-year-old male former congressional page concerned about the appropriateness of an e-mail exchange with a congressman alerted Capitol Hill staffers to the communication

The emails were from Foley's personal account, and were mostly harmless, though i retrospect they could be Foley trolling for interest.  They were sent in the summer of 2005.  It was noted that the boy initiated the contact with a thank you email, but that is irrelevant except maybe for one minor question that I have not heard asked:  Did the kid send the email to Foleys private address, or did Foley just answer it there.

Regardless, the responsible response is "your welcome".

The end.

Foley's office claimed:

...that Foley wrote the e-mails to the young man but says they were completely innocent and that Foley is at most guilty of being "too friendly and too engaging" with young people.