At the end of the day, truth matters. Eventually, in one way or another it surfaces. Learning to detect the earlier signs may save you a lot of pain and aggravation.

after more than three decades spent in and around public life and public officials -- as a member of Congress, the leader of a religious organization, and now as CEO of a non-profit "citizens lobby" -- I'm convinced that politicians are no more dishonest than the rest of us.

Nature has no love of truth. It's about winning, which is to say living to reproduce. Because we are not biologically designed for integrity, we must actively attempt to prevent the social cultivation of dishonesty.

At the heart of our ad-saturated democratic process is a moral paradox. Politicians raise and spend billions of dollars to convince us to trust them. But the fevered competition for votes virtually compels them to lie to us.

Especially when it comes to perpetrating crime and enabling malice, we live in an age when lying and deceit are increasingly tolerated, and not necessarily the exception. High-stakes lying is out of control.