European reaction to President Clinton's misdemeanours had the beleaguered US President cast in a multitude of roles from caddish lad to scurrilous skirt chaser.
In Germany, the highbrow Frankfurter Allgemeine told it like it was, saying Mr Clinton was a President "caught with his trousers down". A skirt chaser, commented one of the paper's journalist, was not a good occupant for the White House.
Mr Clinton was deemed unworthy to sit in the Oval Office by Austrian media too. The Die Presse said his continued presence there would send the wrong political message "to dozens of petty, middling dictators around the world . . . to justify their abuse of rights".
In a case of the pot calling the kettle black, The Sun in Britain said Clinton was "cheap and nasty".
"The lying fornicator must go," bellowed a headline in the tabloid.
The Guardian was considerably gentler and while describing Clinton's behaviour as "stupid, infantile, pathetic, caddish, laddish", said that it did not warrant impeachment.
Swiss newspapers shook their heads and tuttutted that the minutiae of a President's sex life should be published on the Internet. "Never has a President been so exposed," the daily Basler Zeitung all too accurately surmised.
Meanwhile, in laid-back Sweden, the Prime Minister, Mr Goran Persson, appeared incredulous at the furore caused by Mr Clinton's dalliances with Monica Lewinsky. Americans, he said, were lucky that they had nothing more serious to worry about.
"You wonder what we are seeing," he told a reporter. "How will this be judged in 50 years' time?".
German Chancellor Helmut Kohl was quoted yesterday in the Bild am Sonntag newspaper expressing the hope that Mr Clinton would soon get back to business.
"I can only hope that the turbulence in Washington can be put to rest as quickly as possible so that the President is fully capable of performing his tasks," he said, adding that it was vital the debacle did not stop the US playing its full international role.
"At present it is of the utmost importance that the only world power can fully live up to its duties," he said.
Leaving those with an insatiable appetite for Monicagate trivia unsatisfied, the Chancellor said he spoken to Clinton about the whole sorry mess but said it would be "too shabby" to reveal details.
The Czech daily Lidovy Noviny said that in comparison to events in Moscow the scandal was not a priority. The possible departure of a President changes nothing in the US, it said, adding that in Russia the country's future can depend on a single man.
The only place where the silence over the Lewinsky affair was more deafening than the scramble to comment was in Vatican City. The scandal was conspicuous by its absence from L'Osservatore Romano, the Vatican publication.
Instead, it examined what the Swedes and the Czechs might consider more potentially explosive developments in Russia and Bosnia.