It’s time to grow up, San Francisco.

Gavin Newsom has come under all sorts of fire since the scandal broke last week involving his affair with friend and aide Alex Tourk’s wife. Newsom’s political opponents are deliriously excited, his supporters shocked and dismayed and the people of San Francisco, with help from the local press, are eating up the drama with all the vigor and attention they give reality television.

But Gavin Newsom is not a television personality, and he is not your friend. He is the mayor. It is unwise to pretend otherwise. Aside from a handful of people personally involved in the issue, nobody has a stake in this affair. The people of San Francisco should only be interested in and influenced by how well he governs the city.

“But this is just horrible,” comes the outraged reply. “He violated the Man Code! This is even worse than Clinton and Lewinski, because he betrayed his friend! I’ll never trust him again.” Setting aside for a moment the sheer ridiculousness (and sexism) of suggesting it’s morally worse to betray a male friend than a wife – the notion of which I find embarrassing as a fellow man – I have to marvel that anyone ever trusted him at all.

Newsom is a politician. By nature, his job is to convince and manipulate. Given the moral compromises we all inevitably make in our own lives, frail and ambitious as we are, how can we honestly express surprise when we discover compromises in the lives of our elected officials?

This is not to say those lapses in judgment don’t have import, or that they are easily forgiven, or that they don’t reflect poorly on character. Newsom has clearly done wrong by Tourk, and he deserves a solid punch in the nose at the very least. But that is not our concern as citizens of the city. Our concern should be, at all times, how Newsom’s mayoral reign impacts our own lives.

To that end, the important issue now is how this news affects Newsom’s political efficacy. He’s had some hard lessons in this regard over the last few years, wrestling with budget issues when voters didn’t provide the support he expected, or struggling to get the Wi-Fi project off the ground. So his reaction to the hurdles of this scandal will be the true subject of interest to the people of San Francisco.

We never trust our politicians, if we’re smart. We always keep our eyes closely on them and if Newsom’s affair serves as a reminder of that, so much the better. But getting one’s feelings hurt by a betrayal between two strangers is plain silly.