The fallout from former CIA Director David Petraeus’s extramarital affair has spawned the type of sensational media feeding frenzy that Obama detests. But when he holds his first full-scale news conference in eight months Wednesday, Obama will have to explain how he plans to re-create his national security team, what he knows about the burgeoning scandal and why he didn’t get wind of it sooner.

It’ll probably leave him longing to talk more about the fiscal cliff, the less titillating storyline of the week.

Here is POLITICO’s cheat sheet of questions that the president is likely to face:

1. Do you believe the FBI should have told you and Congress sooner about the investigation that led Gen. Petraeus to resign?

Members of Congress’s intelligence committees are outraged that they weren’t told until Friday — moments before Petraeus resigned — that he’d been the subject of a months-long FBI investigation that delved into his private emails and exposed his extramarital affair with his biographer, Paula Broadwell.

The president has yet to comment on the flap, on Petraeus’s decision to resign or on the now-frozen promotion for U.S. commander in Afghanistan Gen. John Allen after reports that he exchanged thousands of pages of emails with a Tampa woman involved in the scandal.

Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) says her panel should have been told much sooner about the FBI probe that involved Petraeus. Other lawmakers, such as House Homeland Security Chairman Peter King (R-N.Y.), are questioning why the FBI got involved at all in what on the surface seemed like a mild case of harassing emails.