Eliot Spitzer's immolation came as a shock, but there was no shortage of New Yorkers gathering gleefully around the fire as his career and reputation burned uncontrollably all week.

At the stock exchange, traders wrote snide farewell messages on doctored photographs showing him embracing topless women. A banner headline across two pages of conservative tabloid the New York Post proclaimed: "I knew he was a fraud and a hypocrite from the moment he swaggered into Capitol." In the accompanying article, reporter Frederic U Dicker, who has harried Spitzer doggedly for years, delighted in getting his man.

The Wall Street Journal, which once dubbed Spitzer "Lord High New York Executioner" for his aggressive prosecution of financial corruption, printed an epitaph on its opinion pages that stopped just short of gloating: "One might call it Shakespearian if there were a shred of nobleness in the story of Eliot Spitzer's fall. There is none."

Shakespeare had plenty to say about hypocrisy, not least in Measure For Measure, the title of which reputedly derives from a New Testament verse: "For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you." When the play's hero, The Duke, discovers that his deputy Angelo does not abide by his own strictly enforced moral code, he exclaims: "O, what may man within him hide, though angel on the outward side!"

The gap between words and deeds is the juiciest slice of this morality tale, not the singing hooker, the wronged wife or the eye-watering sums of money involved. Any public figure spending $80,000 on prostitutes would be hard pressed to stay in office, but the mirth that has convulsed New York is rooted in Spitzer's former image as the spotless "Sheriff of Wall Street".

He habitually preached moral fitness to lead; his sanctimonious tone enraged rivals who had experienced the "f***ing steamroller" first-hand. In a campaign advert from his run for governor in 2006, Spitzer spelled out the "simple rule" that he had followed as attorney-general: "I never asked if a case was popular or unpopular, never asked if it was big or small, hard or easy. I simply asked if it was right or wrong."

In another, he toured the old school of his running mate, new governor David Paterson, to set forth his political philosophy using the signs on the wall: "You begin your journey on Trustworthy Turnpike, make a left past Honesty Road, turn down Integrity Lane, and eventually, if you've walked the right way, end up on Responsibility Road."

At the Chautauqua Institution, in August 2007, he gave a speech of quite astonishing chutzpah. His theme was "the inevitable risks that occur when passion and conviction are not sufficiently tempered by humility". After unfavourably comparing the Bush administration's recklessness in Iraq with his own stewardship of New York, he concluded that "without a greater amount of humility, great power will not simply cause us to make mistakes. It will be our undoing."

Queues snake down the street outside the pantheon of great American hypocrites. In the current political cycle prominent Republicans David Vitter, Mark Foley, Ted Haggard and Randall Tobias have all resigned after being caught with their trousers down. Larry Craig is a dead duck conservative senator, eight months after pleading guilty to soliciting sex in an airport bathroom.

The most egregious aspect of all these cases was the grand canyon between public persona and private behaviour. Haggard was an evangelical leader who aggressively picketed gay bars and opposed marriage rights for homosexuals, while secretly smoking crystal meth and paying for "massages" from a rent boy. Foley was a leading anti-paedophile campaigner, sponsor of the Sex Offender Registration and Notification Act, caught swapping masturbation fantasies with a 16-year-old intern.

In political terms, the reminder that Republicans do not have a monopoly on hypocrisy will be the most significant consequence of Spitzer's fall. Hillary Clinton has one fewer loyal superdelegate; Michael Bloomberg and Rudy Giuliani have a clearer path to becoming New York's governor in 2010. The Democratic party has lost one of its great hopes.

As attorney-general, Spitzer exposed price-fixing among manufacturers of computer chips, stopped banks artificially inflating the value of worthless stocks and broke open a corrosive culture of payola in the music business. But he will be remembered as a man laid low by hubris, incapable of following his own advice.

Two years ago, on ABC news, he was asked what criminals could do to escape the attention of his crusading legal team. "Never talk when you can nod," he replied. "Never nod when you can wink and never write people an email, because it's death - you're giving prosecutors all the evidence we need."