Well that answers that question. That is really disappointing. First Lance, now David Petraeus. My heroes arr crashing and burning one by one. If Usain Bolt is on 'roids I quit.
Here's the thing though...
Does Lance's drug use make his achievements on a bicycle any less superhuman and remarkable? Of course not. All you need to understand to know that is that when they stripped his Tour wins, they couldn't award them to anyone else, because all the runners-up were also convicted dopers. That he doped doesn't make his achievements any less remarkable, it just means that he had more in common with the rest of the pack than we thought.
Same for General (Ret) Petraeus. He no doubt save hundreds, if not thousands of lives in Iraq and Afghanistan. He was an effective combat leader in one of the most difficult combat situations imaginable; nation building in the midst of a violent insurgency in two countries that weren't thrilled with our presence. Further, his nearly 40 year career is punctuated with absolute bad-assery. He was both a soldier's soldier and a thinking man's thinker. That he sometimes let the little head tell the big one what to do just makes him more like the rest of us, and dare I say it, human.
When our heroes fall from "grace", at least half of the letdown is our own unrealistic expectations about what they are. I'm not condoning what he did, but neither can I vilify him or forget his contributions to our country and our profession because of it.