US News

ELIOT, YOU’LL GET HOOKED

NO DOUBT, when Eliot Spitzer was attorney general – or, as he was more fondly called, the Sheriff of Wall Street – you know he expected his high-profile cases to be turned into thinly disguised episodes of “Law & Order.”

Tomorrow night, he gets his wish – in spades. Too bad it’s not the scenario as it played out in real life.

For sure, back in the glory days, Eliot-the-Idiot was thinking it would be about his fight against Dick Grasso, king of the New York Stock Exchange. He wasn’t dreaming that “his” “Law & Order” ripped-from-the-headlines episode would be the one about a New York governor and a hooker.

The unraveling of Gov. Donald Shalvoy (Tom Everett Scott), the governor with a hooker problem on “L&O,” begins when a guy who owns a gold refinery is found stuffed into his furnace.

That leads homicide detectives Cyrus Lupo (Jeremy Sisto) and Kevin Bernard (Anthony Anderson) to investigate the refinery’s clients. Oops.

Lo and behold! They come upon a money-laundering scheme which, in turn, leads them to the shady world of escort services.

The escort service in real life was called grandly The Emperors Club. In the show, it’s the “Excalibur” (which causes the cops to wisecrack in one of the better lines of the night: “It’s for guys with big swords!”).

All of this sword play leads to a voice overheard on a wiretap that is instantly recognizable as the you-know-who. And he really does sound like Spitzer on that phone, I must say.

When the whole thing lands in DA Jack McCoy’s (Sam Waterston’s) lap, it gets even more complicated. We learn that the governor was McCoy’s biggest supporter for the DA job.

One hand is supposed to wash the other (especially after sex with a hooker), but McCoy isn’t a creep like the governor and won’t play along.

The DA begs him to come clean and spend some time explaining everything to his family before it all becomes public knowledge.

But you don’t have to worry about that because . . . it won’t.

The twist “Law & Order” has put on the case is that the governor gets caught, sure, but it doesn’t become a criminal case, or even a public scandal. Now I know why the show’s creator, Dick Wolf, say all the episodes are fiction.

In real life, the governor of New York went from Eliot to John to Client-9 quicker than it took him to transfer money – and there was nothing he could do about it except cry “wolf!”

linda.stasi@nypost.com

COMPLETE POST TV COVERAGE