AP Photo/Kevin Wolf Senate candidate Jim Webb, an accomplished (and sometimes graphic) author.

Some of these public servants shake things loose by writing novels. Novels they might wish they'd kept locked in their heads until the fiery thoughts flamed out.

Take Jim Webb, the ex-novelist now in the spotlight. He is a serious man. A former Navy secretary, he's now running for the Senate in Virginia as a Democrat and he's got positions on the war, health care, trade and prescription drugs. Some other positions he's thought up, however, are of a very different kind.

They may bring the Kama Sutra to mind.

Here's one line he wrote that you won't hear in a Webb for Senate campaign ad, or a Chamber of Commerce one, either: "American ass is our most important product."

Or consider Republican Susan Combs, a candidate for statewide office in Texas. Combs is very much on board with her party's family-values agenda and campaigns for sexual abstinence education, even though the office she is running for is state comptroller — a financial watchdog.

Combs loosened up plenty — maybe unraveled — in a novel she wrote back in 1990.

"His lips sucked gently at the curve of her neck," she wrote, "his tongue brushed against the lobe of her ear, then plunged inside. Her body bucked in reaction at the desire surging through her."

Political opponents are huffily dredging up old words like these in the anything-goes climax of the midterm campaign. Yes, politicians are used to having statements from the past come back to bite them. But usually, it isn't pulp fiction.

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POLITEROTICA

AP Photo/Eric Gay Lynne Cheney: author and wife of a vice president.

The most prominent example is "Sisters," the novel Lynne Cheney wrote when her husband was a congressman and she had apparently gone to one too many rubber-chicken dinners. It's proved a recurring if minor embarrassment now that Dick Cheney is vice president — its subplot of lesbian romance an oddity for an administration not sympathetic to same-sex anything.

"You can go and read Lynne Cheney's lesbian love scenes if you want to get graphic," Webb has said, trying to dampen the fuss over his own explicit writing.

But "Sisters" actually offers a restrained account of romance between women that is part of a far broader novel with textured characters and an intricate plot.

At least, that's one impression after speed-reading the book in less than an hour looking for dirty parts.

It doesn't get much more graphic than this:

"The women who embraced in the wagon were Adam and Eve crossing a dark cathedral stage — no, Eve and Eve, loving one another as they would not be able to once they ate of the fruit and knew themselves as they truly were."

"... Let us go away together, away from the anger and imperatives of men. We shall find ourselves a secluded bower where they dare not venture. There will be only the two of us, and we shall linger through long afternoons of sweet retirement. In the evenings, I shall read to you while you work your cross-stitch in the firelight."

"And then we shall go to bed, our bed, my dearest girl."

("Sisters" is selling for $595.95 on Amazon.com, although it can be read for free in its entirety online.)

Then there's former House speaker Newt Gingrich and his thriller "1945," complete with a "pouting sex kitten" and an act you shouldn't try at home — or at least say at home. It involves the mistress of the president's chief of staff sitting "athwart" her lover's chest.

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POLITICAL IMPACT?

Scholars and pundits are busy analyzing the consequences of Webb's naughty writing on the election, the culture and perhaps the future of civilization itself.

But who cares about that, really? Let's look at some more cheesy erotica.

"Ross gave a quick tug and her pajama bottoms slid away with a quiet rustle," Combs, the Texas comptroller candidate, wrote in "A Perfect Match," in which heartthrobs are hardly the only throbs going on. "Suddenly she was bare. He thrust his leg between hers, and a deep heaviness throbbed in her belly. She needed him to fill the aching void at her center."

Webb, clearly a more serious novelist, is also much more explicit in the passages dredged up by his GOP opponent, George Allen, in their down-to-the-wire race. A Vietnam veteran, Webb says he witnessed acts that have lent realism — sometimes disturbing realism — to his novels.

These include a shocking account of an act of incest that Webb said he saw unfold before his eyes on the streets of Southeast Asia.

They also involve bouncing, glistening breasts; a homoerotic episode of "quick, grinding voices, turgid with repressed passion"; "a deliciously bad young woman" with "firm, springy skin"; and a repressed woman named Morphine Mary.

"If she'd just get laid every now and then she'd mellow out and stop being such a damn witch," he wrote in "A Sense of Honor" in 1981.

Webb was a Marine platoon commander in Vietnam and his band of brothers thinks his books are very much worth reading. The Marines' Professional Reading Program plugs calls 1979's "Fields of Fire" the "classic novel of the Vietnam War" and says "the characters in Webb's novel are timeless. He succeeds brilliantly in making them real."

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FICTION & NONFICTION

Of course, when it comes to sex scandals, nonfiction has played a starring role this year — namely the fallout over former Rep. Mark Foley's come-ons to congressional pages.

But if the Foley episode was stranger than fiction, perhaps nothing is stranger than Scooter Libby's fiction.

Cheney's former chief of staff, now charged with obstruction and perjury in outing of CIA operative Valerie Plame, published "The Apprentice" in 1996, a year after he left the Defense Department as deputy undersecretary for policy. Libby's novel manages to combine pedophilia, bestiality, prostitution and incest in the same scene.

His indictment last year spurred interest in the book and plans by the publisher to print another run. (A year earlier, Cheney's publisher wanted to reprint "Sisters" but stopped after receiving a call from her attorney.)

Perhaps the sordid real-life world begs for the sunny tonic of Susan Combs' sex scenes. Combs, 61, a mother of three who's been married for 31 years, says her fictional sex was good, clean fun and told her Democratic opponent to chill out about it.

She's used to ribbing — a few years ago, Democrats read passages from her book to keep a filibuster going in the Texas Legislature.

Cover your eyes, then spread your fingers and take a peek for yourself:

"Clutching his shoulders, her mouth blindly sought his. Desperate for release, she tightened her grip. 'Ross,' she managed, feeling as though she were spinning out of control."

Not unlike Election 2006, come to think of it.

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