When you write in your memoir that for a stretch you were “smoking crack every 15 minutes,” and then cocaine is found in your father’s house, suspicious eyes will turn toward you. And when your father’s house is the White House, and the discovery of the cocaine prompts an evacuation of the building, it stops being anything resembling a private matter.

Could it be someone else who brought cocaine into the White House? Sure. A spokesman for the Secret Service, Anthony Guglielmi, said the white powder was found in a “work area of the West Wing.” A senior law-enforcement official told CBS News the substance was found “in a storage facility in a cubby routinely used by White House staff and guests to store cell phones.”

But White House staffers are not known to be notorious drug users. All of them go through background checks, a lot of them have security clearances, and under federal law, using drugs, particularly a “hard drug” such as cocaine, would trigger an automatic revocation of your security clearance and be grounds for immediate termination.

[This morning’s media spin that it could have been tourists or athletes from championship teams who dropped a baggie is amusing. We can play the “what if it was a Republican game” all day long on that spin, but … it is at least possible. But aren’t visitors to the White House screened and searched before entry? And how likely is it that someone would bring a bag of coke on a one-time tour of the White House? Possible does not equal ‘likely.’ — Ed]