judging not, lest he be judg... oh wait (photo: Gage Skidmore via Flickr)

Well, this is a compelling touch, bound to warm the hearts of family-values Republicans seeking a presidential nominee next year. I’m not sure he’s “Newt’s Divorce Lawyer” when the final result was an annulment, but Randy Evans now speaks for Newt’s nascent presidential campaign:

The Atlanta Journal Constitution reported Saturday that Randy Evans, the lawyer in charge of Gingrich’s business interests, said Gingrich would announce the formation of a presidential exploratory committee within “the next 10 days.” Evans was Gingrich’s lawyer during his divorce proceedings in 1999.

That was this divorce:

Callista Bisek, Gingrich’s current wife, became his mistress first and his wife second (really third, if one is counting wives), while Marianne was home visiting her mother. In 1999, Marianne had just been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. Newt asked Callista to marry him before he and Marianne had agreed to divorce. The affair had been going on for years. Newt compared Marianne to a “Jaguar” and Callista to a “Chevrolet” and said he needed a Chevrolet, not a Jaguar, according to the Esquire story. In 2000 the couple wed.

Even so Gingrich continued to give speeches about family. “How do you give that speech and do what you are doing?” Marianne asked him. They were in the death throes of their relationship. “It doesn’t matter what I do,” he told her, according to the Esquire story. “People need to hear what I have to say. There’s no one else who can say what I say. It doesn’t matter what I live.”

Not to be confused with Newt’s previous divorce:

Newt proposed to Marianne (she was 28, he 36) in 1980 while his first wife, Jackie, was in the hospital recovering from treatments for uterine cancer. He hadn’t yet even asked her for a divorce. Newt met Jackie in high school. She was his geometry teacher. He was sixteen, she was 25. When he left, Jackie was nearly destitute. Jackie, the Esquire story reports, “had to get a court order just to pay her utility bills.”

History-making disgraced “don’t call me fat!” former Speaker Newt Gingrich is the “underrated” (WaPo’s Cillizza) likely presidential candidate whose campaign is centered on the theme that America is in moral crisis:

So as he travels the country, he is striking two related notes: that the nation faces not just a fiscal crisis but also a loss of its moral foundation, and that his conversion to Catholicism two years ago is part of an evolution that has given him a deeper appreciation for the role of faith in public life.

That sounds like something which Newt might want to avoid, since loss of moral foundation is at the center of the question: “Which hideous adulterous divorce from which wife who was being treated for a which life-changing or -altering disease?”

Especially when Newt’s campaign spokesman is his most recent divorce attorney.