Governor Eliot Spitzer was, of course, the talk of Seventh Avenue on Tuesday. Most people I spoke to were fairly disgusted with him and felt that he had no choice but to resign.

The silver lining for most: Slopers seemed excited about getting the first black and the first blind governor, Lt. Governor David Patterson.

In Starbucks, I had a quick conversation with a composer friend, who thought the real problem was that Spitzer was a reformer, the Sheriff of Wall Street, who put himself above the law. This friend deconstructed Spitzer’s so-called apology and said it was B.S. “He said he violated his obligation to the public, his family and any sense of right and wrong. He didn’t violate anything, he just got caught. He should have admitted what he did.”

Mid-morning, a friend from Prospect Heights told me that she and her husband tried to come up with the perfect New York Post headline. “Spritzer Spritzes” was the one they liked the best.

Another friend, a a 9/11 widow and writer, said she really respected him and the things he did on Wall Street and for the firefighters. “I spoke to him and really liked him,” she said. She is very saddened by this turn of events. But she knows that he has to resign.

For many, hypocracy was at the crux of the issue. “How do you devote your career fighting to liars and cheats and do something like this,” someone told me.

There was much in the way of psychological examination. Last night at Santa Fe Grill, a friend, a Unitarian Minister in Kensington, told me that there’s a Freudian term for what he did. “Freud called it reaction formation.”

I looked up that term in a handy online dictionary of Freudian terms at changingminds.org:

Reaction Formation occurs when a person feels an urge to do or say something and then actually does or says something that is effectively the opposite of what they really want. It also appears as a defense against a feared social punishment. If I fear that I will be criticized for something, I very visibly act in a way that shows I am personally a long way from the feared position.

Also at Santa Fe last night one friend said, “This wouldn’t even be an issue in Europe. In France. No one would care.

“But it’s the hypocracy of the thing,” someone countered.

“And what about the fact that he’s a delegate for Hillary Clinton. She loses a delegate in all this,” one of my writer friends piped in.

For Hepcat, it’s all about irony. “Eliot Spitzer may have a career ahead of him as the little picture in the dictionary that illustrates irony. He pushed through the banking regulations that caught him.”