Richard Russo, the world's greatest living novelist (sorry, it's a measurable fact, not an opinion), recently penned an op-ed piece for The Washington Post.  In the piece Russo imagined what might be in a novel he would write about the Eliot Spitzer train wreck.  In the piece Russo says:

Fictive Eliot will do exactly what the real Eliot has done, only my guy almost never imagines getting caught.  And when he does occasionally consider the possibility, he trusts that there will be ample warning that disaster is imminent.  For the most part, things in his life have happened slowly, especially the good things, and he trusts that bad things will evolve similarly.  He will swerve at the last moment (emphasis mine).  The possibility of a head-on collision, swift and devastating, simply never occurs to him."