Bear's Lamborghini crash. Craig's men's room-bust

The $350,000 Lamborghini belonging to Bears linebacker Lance Briggs sits at Lin-Mar Motors, Inc. in Morton Grove after the wreck. Tribune Photo by Candice Cusick.

Andrew Zajac

At first glance, Chicago Bears linebacker Lance Briggs and embattled Idaho Republican Sen. Larry Craig would seem to have little in common.

But their own self-declared failures of nerve both put them in the headlines this past week.

In Briggs' case, his loss of composure led him to abandon his heavily damaged, $350,000 Lamborghini on the side of the Edens Expressway in the early hours of last Monday morning and wound up with him being charged with a handful of misdemeanors connected to leaving the scene of the accident and failure to timely notify the police.

The next day, Briggs owned up to the car and to what he said had motivated his fleeing: "I panicked," he said. Of course nobody knows or likely will ever know exactly what Briggs was doing at the time of the accident, so if he had anything to hide, well, he hid it. So 'panicking' might have saved Briggs a heap more trouble.

The legal charges don't look like the kind that are likely to cost him much time or treasure and Bears Coach Lovie Smith, who knows a cog in his defense when he sees one, said he didn't plan on disciplining Briggs.

Much different story for Craig.

The damage from his activities in a men's room of the Minneapolis airport on June 11 stayed invisible for weeks, and his problem wasn't that he evaded the police but that he couldn't.

But the real killer for Craig might have been that he panicked -- or as he put it, "overreacted" -- by pleading guilty to disorderly conduct, thus placing an admission of wrongdoing in the public record.

It's toothpaste that won't go back in the tube.

Craig's only shot at surviving this, admittedly a slim one, would be if he went public and fought the charges. (He is, however, reported to be ready to announce his resignation, effective Sept. 30, this morning at 11:30 am CDT.)

Who knows what discovery might have turned up?

Was the cop overzealous?

Have other sex stings at the airport popped innocent people?

Yeah, Craig's been dogged for decades now by rumors about his sexual orientation and the Idaho Statesman pieced together a pretty convincing case that he's trolled public bathrooms before.

But Craig's admission of guilt and his loopy assertion that he was under stress and didn't really understand -- after 25 years in Congress -- what he was doing when he signed his guilty plea beggars belief.

Made it sound like he travels between Boise and Washington with a note with his name, address and phone number on it pinned to his shirt in case he gets lost.

So now Briggs can get his car fixed and move on.

Craig, too, can move on, though probably not in the way he'd like.