Gingrich Says His Affair Unlike Clinton’s

Former U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich has admitted to an extramarital affair while leading the moral charge against U.S. President Bill Clinton in 1998.

But the conservative Republican and possible 2008 presidential contender said his affair was merely immoral while Clinton’s dalliance with intern Monica Lewinsky crossed into the criminal arena when the president committed perjury.

In a telephone interview with Focus on the Family founder James Dobson, Gingrich said his relentless pursuit of Clinton was not rendering judgment on another human being.

Instead, he said he was doing his job as a leader of the government trying to uphold the rule of law. You cannot accept … perjury in your highest officials.

The twice-divorced Gingrich, 63, was embraced by the Moral Majority and positioned himself as a torchbearer for family values in the mid to late 1990s.

His first wife claims he left her while she was fighting cancer and during his second divorce in 2000, it was revealed Gingrich had been seeing a congressional aide 20 years his junior, who is now his third wife.

There are times that I have fallen short of my own standards, Gingrich said in the interview streaming on the Focus on the Family Web site. There’s certainly times when I’ve fallen short of God’s standards and my neighbor’s standards.

Gingrich resigned from Congress in 1988 over alleged ethics violations.