They've been getting by on spin and raw power for so long that House Republican leaders apparently don't know how to handle a truly damaging scandal when it pops up and bites them in the e-mails.

Now, fingers are pointing every which as to exactly how top House Republicans responded to word that Rep. Mark Foley was sending creepy e-mails to a former teenage page last autumn.

A new version of an old Watergate-era question now swirls around House Speaker Dennis Hastert: What did he NOT know and when did he NOT know it?

Hastert said he does not recall being told last spring by Rep. Tom Reynolds, the House Republican campaign chairman, about the questionable e-mail, although he does not dispute Reynolds' account. Wrong answer. Inability to recall alleged mash notes from a congressman to a teenaged page makes one wonder what else the speaker may have lost in his amnesia.

Hastert and other leaders say they first became aware of "overly friendly" e-mails from Foley to an underage male page last spring, but had no idea that the congressman had sent other more sexually explicit messages to other pages. "There wasn't much there other than a friendly inquiry," Hastert said of the 2005 message from Foley. But Foley's "friendly inquiry," which asked for a photograph and mentioned how another teen was in "great shape," was called something else by the former page who received it: "sick."

That's "over friendly" enough, in Hastert's words, to raise alarm bells in my head and in the heads of quite a few other parents I know. Yet, Hastert and other House leaders didn't probe much further. Foley already had been confronted last fall by Rep. John Shimkus (R-Ill.), the House clerk who also heads the page board, and told to break off contact with the page, according to Hastert's office. Hastert told reporters on Monday (Oct. 2) that his aides and Rep. Rodney Alexander (R-La.), the former page's congressman, had dropped the matter in accordance with the page's parents' wishes.

Majority Leader John Boehner of Ohio said in a Cincinnati radio interview that Hastert had assured him last spring that the matter "had been taken care of." Of course, when a cynical fan of "The Sopranos" like me hears that something has been "taken care of," I immediately wonder if there was a nice resolution or whether the matter was thrown into a river wearing concrete overshoes.

Either way, the story exploded onto page one last Friday when ABC News reported other, far more lurid e-mails to other pages two years earlier that were far more sexually explicit than the initially disclosed messages.

Suddenly, the vaunted GOP spin machine threw its gears. White House spokesman Tony Snow dismissively called the messages "naughty" in a chat with reporters, then later jacked up his language to stronger denunciations. Former speaker Newt Gingrich said on a TV talk show that House leaders might have worried that if they pursued the matter they'd be "accused of gay-bashing." But Foley was not in hot water for being homosexual. He was in trouble for making the sort of suggestions by e-mail to teenaged boys that would have been no less vile or, perhaps, criminal, if made to a teenaged girl who also happened to be under the custodial care of the House page program.

And, of course, none of this would be as damaging to House leaders had they not allowed Foley to remain co-chair of the Congressional Missing and Exploited Children's Caucus. That's the congressional equivalent of assigning a fox to guard the hen house.

The first rule of damage control is to assess the damage. Unfortunately for Hastert and other House Republican leaders, they tried to brush the Foley matter aside in its early days. Now it's come back to damage their chances of keeping the house in the November elections.

Even the conservative Washington Times is calling for Hastert's resignation as the party faces mid-term elections burdened by one of the most shocking scandals since Catholic bishops were charged with covering up for pedophile priests.

The only good news politically for Republicans is that their sinking polls so far have not been accompanied by soaring approval numbers for the Democrats. The public appears to be weary of lackluster leadership on both sides of the aisle in facing the nation's current problems. But returning control of both houses to the Republicans doesn't offer much of a remedy. Neither party is corruption-free, but a balance of power helps to keep bad behavior in check.

CLARENCE PAGE is a columnist for the Chicago Tribune.