If you work in the press gallery, you’ll hear regular rumours about the personal lives of politicians. Usually, they’re wrong. Often they’re circulated not by someone’s political opponents in another party but by party enemies — shit-sheets are almost invariably internal documents.

Rumours about a senior MP and one of their staffers have been circulating for some time. On Saturday, a News Corp tabloid decided, under the guise of reporting on a smear campaign against the MP, to allude, without much detail, to them. Fortunately, it received virtually no media follow-up, except obliquely, in The Australian today. Nonetheless, probably 95% of the people who now know something about the matter only do so because of the editorial decision of one outlet.

On social media, there was plenty of sniping from the Twitterati about the unwillingness of the press gallery to cover the story. There were two main arguments: prominent figures from the other party to the MP had been targeted over their personal lives in years and decades previous, so that made it somehow OK. Alternatively, the MP had, in their political activities, set a different standard for behaviour to the one they allegedly had exhibited themselves.

The first argument doesn’t pass muster. This is not a partisan issue: it is always wrong to cover the personal lives of figures except where there’s a public interest justification. The second argument depends on where you set the threshold. In this case, the threshold appears to have been set absurdly low. Merely mentioning marriage doesn’t make you a family values campaigner whose hypocrisy needs to be exposed to the public. There needs to be a compelling public interest in such exposure, and even if these specific allegations are true, this case is a very long way from satisfying that.

There is a public interest if taxpayer money is being wasted, or if an MP or anyone else is engaging in harassment — or litigation eventuates. MPs’ offices can be deeply toxic workplaces; many people have had their lives ruined by bullying and harassment by politicians; politics isn’t magically free of sexual predators and rapists. But again, there’s no suggestion that any of that applies in this case. People have workplace affairs. People meet future partners at work. None of that is anyone else’s business. Especially when most of the rest of us are pretty imperfect as well.