Did Spitzer take the governorship knowing he would crash?

Here’s a troubling thought:

When Eliot Spitzer ran for governor, and took over as New York’s chief executive, he may have known that his political career was already doomed.

That’s the theory of one of his top advisers and confidantes, Lloyd Constantine, who has just published a new book, unveiled this week in Politico.

“The secret things Eliot had been doing and [the] certainty that Eliot understood that they inevitably would come to light and bring him down, and all of us with him, had been steadily dripping venom into his mind,” Constantine writes.

This altered personality transformed “the brilliant, dedicated and decisive man I had known and loved for more than a quarter century” into someone he called “the Imposter.”

Constantine describes increasingly bizarre behavior on Spitzer’s part, with weird rages interspersed with bouts of what he calls “serenity.”

It’s a troubling idea, one that nudges Spitzer toward the Jonathan Edwards category of narcissism in my mind.

What if he took the state’s job, knowing he was about to take us all on this awful, ugly journey into dysfunction?

In many ways, our state’s terrifying gridlock harkens back to his meltdown.

A figure with the clout and personal gifts to change Albany and navigate us through this recession turned out to be symptomatic of its deepest problems.

The full Politico article is worth reading. If nothing else, this book may pose a serious setback to Spitzer’s effort to rehabilitate himself…