Howie Carr on the Carl Stanley McGee controversy.

It’s been almost seven weeks now since a $115,000-a-year Deval Patrick hack named Carl Stanley McGee was arrested at a posh resort in Florida and charged with sexually assaulting a 15-year-old boy in a steamroom.

Yet the assistant secretary of policy and planning in the Executive Office of Housing and Economic Development remains on “unpaid leave” -not fired, in other words.

McGee was arrested Dec. 29 and continued drawing a paycheck until Jan. 7. Granted, he is innocent until proven guilty, but what about the appearance of impropriety? These are not frivolous charges - the platinum-haired fop’s bail was set at $300,000.

Suppose this had happened in a Republican administration - say, Mitt Romney’s. What if a conservative, heterosexual GOP lawyer who worked for Mitt had been charged with sexually assaulting a 15-year-old girl?

You think it would have taken six weeks for the story to break? And now it’s practically disappeared. McGee has already gotten one continuance, which raises the question of whether a broom is being readied.

According to the cops, Deval’s minion first approached the boy in the men’s room and struck up a conversation. The next day the kid was in a steamroom when McGee came in, sat down beside the child, and, according to the police, dropped his towel. You can guess the rest of the sordid story.

Compare McGee’s alleged crime to the arrest last summer of Sen. Larry Craig. All he did was assume a “wide stance.” Or Rep. Mark Foley. He got drunk and wrote some randy e-mails to pages. Why are they run out of office and McGee can hang in there?

UPDATE: More from Red Mass Group, Steve Bailey, the Globe, Holly Robichaud and the Herald.

SECOND UPDATE: More from the Herald.

THIRD UPDATE: More from the Herald, Globe and Howie Carr.