LEXINGTON, KY. ? There she stood, newspaperless and a tad sheepish about it, behind the News & Gifts counter at Blue Grass Airport.

“I tell them every time: ‘When there’s news, you’ve got to bring me more papers,'” said the bespectacled, gray-haired clerk. “They were gone in no time. Pffft, right out the door. All 50 gone by 9 a.m.”

Little wonder. On the front page of the Lexington Herald-Leader and the Louisville Courier-Journal were enormous close-up photographs of Gov. Paul E. Patton, crying so hard his nose was running.

The news, of course, was that the second-term Democrat a father of four, married to wife Judi for 25 years and head of the National Governors Assn. had admitted having an affair with a businesswoman.

The pictures accurately portrayed the most emotional confession by a politician almost anyone could recall, from the mea culpa by former Colorado Sen. Gary Hart that scuttled his chances of becoming president in 1988, to that of former President Clinton, whose fling with intern Monica Lewinsky nearly cost him the Oval Office.

The rub is, in the post-Clinton era, most people here just are not that worked up about a sex scandal in the governor’s mansion. Sure, they’re interested. Of course they are buying the papers and watching the news.

“Did you see him on TV last night?” one man asked another downtown here on Saturday. “Pathetic.”

“Ah, the governor,” a waitress at the Glass Garden restaurant said to a customer reading the newspaper. “The governor,” she said again, as if that was all there was to say.

But on a sunny Saturday, people here were giving the 65-year-old Patton a respite after a long, hard week. For the time being, they also were giving him the benefit of the doubt.

If it turns out the governor granted nursing-home owner Tina Conner business favors, and then sicced state regulators on her when she ended their affair, as the 40-year-old Conner contends in a lawsuit, that’s a serious issue, people agree.

If it’s just about sex …

“Who cares!” blurted Christina Condra, the feisty, 26-year-old manager of the Fayette Cigar Store in downtown Lexington.

“Not me,” sighed a passing co-worker.

Two days after Conner filed a sexual harassment lawsuit, Patton on Friday held the emotional news conference, conceding he had engaged in an “improper personal relationship” with Conner, 40, who was divorced earlier this summer.

Patton was surrounded by several family members when he spoke, but his wife who two days prior had stood beside her husband as he denied any affair with Conner was conspicuously absent. She had gone to stay with sisters in Appalachia, where both she and her husband were born.