Politico took notice today, in a piece titled “For election insight, Twitter beats cable.”

Political junkie Mike Murphy couldn’t get his fix while flipping through the cable networks Tuesday night.

“With a few exceptions,” Murphy told POLITICO, “like [James] Carville on CNN or [Karl] Rove on Fox, I didn’t see people who know anything about elections.”

But the Republican political consultant found another outlet to scratch the itch: Twitter. The social networking platform, Murphy said, “was a better place to watch the election.” And after a while, he decided to participate with non-stop Tweets of his own.

For hardcore lovers of politics, Twitter served up the real-time nuts and bolts of campaigns racing to the finish line. Top political reporters like NBC’s Chuck Todd tapped away for hours as results came in. Meanwhile, the Washington Independent’s Dave Weigel provided constant, on-the-ground dispatches from New York’s 23rd congressional district, with Twitpics inside Conservative Doug Hoffman headquarters as the tide changed toward the Democrats. With each precinct reporting, journalists and junkies offered quick takes, both amusing and analytical.

The cable networks broadcast the news, and had reporters like CNN’s John King, who went deep on each race on CNN’s Magic Wall. But they also featured a motley assortment of analysts and partisan guests who sometimes seemed to have little familiarity with the races in play and might have turned off anyone hungry for more sophisticated insight.

While the pundits on TV were droning about this and that, Weigel was tweeting pithy insight about the returns from specific districts that beat anything that could be found on cable.

In one of my journalism classes today, we had a discussion about Twitter and the ethical questions it raises. Do you tweet people’s offhand remarks? Should unflattering details observed by a reporter be tweeted or should they be kept secret?

I say tweet first, ask questions later.