Arthur Sibler has an excellent post on "l'affair Wiegel," in which he links to Marc Ambinder's post on the same subject. All of this is very inside baseball, with a case of characters that would shame the rogue's gallery that is the Baseball Hall of Fame, but Sibler extracts a telling quote from Ambinder's post:

[The listserv in which the entire tryst started is/was a] members-only coffee shop where people who take ideas seriously, who want access to people who take ideas seriously, could test their own ideas before they refined and presented them to the public.

Sibler comments on the obvious delusions of a personality that would say such a thing. I merely pass along this article, which seems to hold similar insights.