Soon after we read the now-former NYDN’s “My Life as a Gossip Columnist” op-ed in the LA Times yesterday (and poked fun at Patrick Gavin, of course), a couple of in-the-know Washingtonians were quick to point out that Grove had already written a behind-the-scenes gossip tell-all for the WaPo Magazine five years ago.

Unlike his latest tome, in which Mr. Grove failed to explain how in the hell he got Mort Zuckerman to offer him a 300K per year contract to write NYDN’s Lowdown, for the WaPo piece he went on and on about how the Reliable Source fell, er, into his somewhat sorry lap circa 1999:

I was in a rut. For a couple of years, I had been living in limbo as a separated guy — in a shabby one-bedroom apartment where my two children slept in the living room on cots during their weekend visits. I had been mired in the messy, draining malaise of an expiring marriage while trying to make a new life for myself. There was definitely allure in the shock of the new, not to mention the promise of endless supplies of chilled shrimp and spicy cocktail sauce on Washington’s social circuit. Manhattan media titan Graydon Carter, who had published a few of my movie star profiles in Vanity Fair, was among the sages I consulted. “You should do it,” Carter intoned. “You’ll be a babe magnet.”

I took the job.

Within his WaPo speak easy, Grove implied that he was, indeed, a ladies man while headquartered (and hindquartered?) in Washington. But was he a “babe magnet” in NYC? We don’t know. He offered nary a bit of dirt about his personal conquests in yesterday’s op-ed (from what he wrote, it seems the sexiest beef he attracted while at the NYDN was a stern lecture from Tom Brokaw). However, in the WaPo piece, he explained how he once slept with a source and then the Reliable Source wrote about her, which — shocker – got him in a tish of trouble:

The Reliable Source published a brief interview with a 26-year-old policy analyst and television talking head named Amy Holmes, the only D.C. resident on People magazine’s popular “50 Most Beautiful People” list. Amy and I had recently started dating, but that didn’t seem like good and sufficient reason to ignore her success. The item was a no-brainer…

The consequences came quickly. Around lunchtime the following Thursday, gossip columnist Mitchell Fink left me an urgent message to call him back at the New York Daily News. When I reached him, he cut to the chase: “Someone told me that you’re dating the woman you wrote about in your column last week. Is this true?” I was paralyzed by fear — my head swimming, my palms cold and clammy. For several seconds I couldn’t speak. I felt as if I was suddenly at the center of a grotesque Washington ethics scandal. Finally, I stuttered, “Er, Mitchell, c-c-c-can we talk off the record?”

If he did cork any sources while on the Lowdown, we want to know, and damn it, Grove should have told us. Now we’re left to do all of the grunt work ourselves.

Indeed, working at the Daily News has apparently made a once wild and crazy guy much less willing to wax poetic about his own financial and sexual profits. Who knew that the city that never sleeps could tame Lloyd Grove in ways that, it seems, our fair Washington never could?