I try to take things where I find them, but I didn’t expect to find the most interesting article I’ve read on Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner on page 466 of Vogue, the metropolitan phonebook-sized women’s fashion magazine.

I think of Vogue and I think of Meryl Streep in “The Devil Wears Prada” and a character not unlike Editor Anna Wintour.

I didn’t even know Vogue ran political articles.

I started thumbing through the March issue to read about Tina Fey, who returns to “Saturday Night Live” April 10 to host.

For all the impact Geithner, 48, has had on Main Street with his bailout of the financial industry, I knew nothing about him as a person and was rather surprised to hear him say from his Washington, D.C., office, ornate enough for a Hogwarts headmaster, that he is “incredibly angry at what happened to our country.”

Can’t recall I’ve ever seen him angry, even as the whipping boy in a heated hearing.

He often seems more like a young Rodney Dangerfield.

The magazine, for example, insinuates that when People magazine named him one of the 100 most beautiful folks of 2009, “it may have helped that his brother works for the publication.”

Vogue also disses those looks:

“Half an inch one way he’s John F. Kennedy, half an inch the other he’s Lyle Lovett,” which was good enough for Julia Roberts.

No wonder he’s “prone to making jokes at his own expense.”

“The first thing he tells me when we sit down is how much ‘s–‘ he’s going to get from his friends for doing an interview with Vogue,” Rebecca Johnson writes.

He is portrayed as very affable in a demanding, 15-hour-a-day job where he sometimes sleeps and showers at the office at the expense of time with his wife and two children.

Geithner’s “continuity” has become a “political liability now because is seen as a friend to Wall Street,” says David Wessel, a Journal editor.

“If mistakes were made at AIG, he can’t say it didn’t happen under his watch. He was at the scene of a lot of car accidents, even if he didn’t cause them.”

As “the Obama administration’s point person for a cratering economy,” Geithner’s mom thought about watching TV with the volume turned down.

“It has been hard,” said Deborah Geithner, a piano teacher who lives on Cape Cod with her husband, Peter, a retired director of the Ford Foundation’s Asia program.

He and his wife, Carole Sonnenfeld, graduated from Dartmouth University together in 1983 and married two years later.

She is a therapist who specializes in grief counseling.

She often tells him he’s not showing enough emotion toward people suffering in this economy, but at the same time he has had to be stoic enough to confront point-blank requests that he resign.

Turns out, Geithner has blown his top.

The angriest he has ever been was probably the afternoon a camera crew for Jon Stewart’s “Daily Show” unexpectedly appeared at his house in Larchmont, N.Y., to pick some low-hanging satire: Even the Secretary of the Treasury was having trouble selling his $1.6 million mock-Tudor residence as the housing bubble popped.

His ire was due to his teens being home alone and not in on the joke.

Geithner is reported to be rankled by the perception he is motivated by a desire to cozy up to Wall Street.

He wasn’t a fixture on the New York social scene when he was with the Federal Reserve, but many of his aides worked for companies that either received government money or benefited from guarantees provided by it.

His chief of staff lobbied for Goldman Sachs.

“But Geithner himself has never passed through that revolving door,” Johnson writes, pointing out that this public servant has never been a banker or an investment banker.
In an industry driven by profits for shareholders, a key fact I never knew about Geithner is that he grew up in Africa, India and Thailand.

Surrounded by “extreme poverty … an inescapable part of everyday life,” he “never developed an appetite for extreme wealth.”

His kids went to public school.

He took more than a 50-percent pay cut to move from the New York Federal Reserve to Treasury.

In fact, his personal frugality led to his most famous misstep with his tax returns for the International Monetary Fund.

Instead of hiring an accountant to prepare his taxes, Geithner did them himself with TurboTax, the software program not designed to account for the way international companies pay American employees.

“For the first time in my life,” Geithner, whose political hero is Lyndon Baines Johnson, tells Vogue, “all my judgments are seen through this prism that I am somehow here to protect and defend (the financial sector), even though I am constantly in a fight with them. They think I am being too tough on them with reform. They complain we don’t listen to them.

“You can’t do these jobs worrying about perceptions. You have to focus on improving real things that matter. To consider what is popular will lead you astray, and you will have no integrity to do the important things that will make the country stronger. I don’t think we can change Wall Street by exhorting and shaming.”

John Eby is Daily News managing editor. E-mail him at john.eby @leaderpub.com.