In the days since a jury convicted him of appalling sexual crimes against two young girls, Jeffrey Donaldson has been revealed as a man whose private life stood in stark contradiction to the moral and political positions he espoused throughout three decades at the top of Northern Irish politics. None of the stories emerging since the verdict are criminal in nature, and they pale beside the offences for which he now awaits sentence. But the consequences for the DUP, the party he led until the day of his arrest, seem certain to be profound and far-reaching.It is already clear from the statements of former senior party figures, including Ian Paisley jnr and Jim Wells, that Donaldson’s behaviour was wildly at odds not just with the pious religiosity he projected to his Lagan Valley constituents, but with the core principles of the DUP itself. Since its foundation by Ian Paisley in the early 1970s, the party has purveyed a brand of intransigent Old Testament-inflected politics on matters of private morality that made it the most socially conservative parliamentary bloc in either Britain or Ireland. That zealotry was tempered somewhat as the party expanded to accommodate dissident Ulster Unionists in the wake of the Belfast Agreement, Donaldson among them. But it remains evident in the party’s positions on reproductive rights, LGBT issues and other matters of personal conduct.Hypocrisy is hardly a novel trait in politics, but Donaldson’s operated on a particularly startling scale. The spotlight now falls on the many senior colleagues who were, it appears, aware of his reckless and politically perilous behaviour over the course of his career, and who must account for why they still saw fit to elect him leader. The fact that Donaldson exploited the structures of evangelical Christianity as an alternative justice system to evade the law should also spur serious self-examination among the members of those communities.There is no credible evidence to support TUV leader Jim Allister’s suggestion that Donaldson’s double life may have been exploited by British intelligence to pressure the DUP into compromise on the Northern Ireland Protocol and the Windsor Framework. But given unionism’s well-established tendency to scent betrayal in every difficulty, it is hardly surprising that the claim has been made.Faced with a gathering storm, the DUP has announced an independent review. That seems unlikely to staunch the wounds. With Assembly and local elections less than a year away, a reordering of power within unionism may now be in prospect. And perhaps also a version of the broader reckoning that shook Irish Catholic nationalism in the 1990s, when the chasm between pious public rhetoric and private reality finally proved no longer tenable.