Honour among adulterers?

A new scandal has hit the BBC. Nothing to do with the numerous Savile-related enquiries, exceedingly large payoffs, or Lisa Riley doing the splits on "Strictly". No - according to the Evening Standard, two BBC News 24 presenters "have been banned from appearing on screen together after having an affair". It's hardly novel for journalists to be front-page (or in this case 11th-page) news and I doubt many people are greatly shocked.

What caught my eye though was a quote from "a friend" of Tim Willcox, whose profile rose when he covered the Chilean mine drama and who's now left his wife for a married colleague 15 years his junior. Said the friend, "He is... very honourable so all this will have been very difficult for him." Not half as difficult as for the dumped mother of his four children, I suspect.

And excuse me for being a little sensitive about this particular topic, but how did the word honourable creep into a sentence discussing a man's adultery? That's some strange word association. Cheating on your spouse may be exciting, middle-age-cliched, sordid, devious, or many other things. But whatever honour he could claim was left outside the bedroom door.