Edwards cheated...Can we move on to the actual candidate now?

The only thing worse than the media not covering the John Edwards affair is them covering it.

Seriously, Kaus, I get it. The MSM was sitting on the story. It's on CNN now, so you can talk about some other topic on your blog!

While I give him credit for following the story while most of the media was purposefully ignoring it, he's discussed almost nothing else for about a month now and is kind of giving me reason to understand exactly why so many news outlets had been avoiding it. I always thought he was kind of a tool, but he really starts sounding like an obsessive crazy in some of these. Do we really need hourly updates on this?

I first noticed the story on his blog months ago—before the "love child" was even born—and, at the time, it was certainly pretty interesting. There definitely seemed to be too many strange twists for the Edwards official story to be true, so why was no one else talking about it? Especially when they were reporting similarly damaging accusations with even less evidence.

The thing is, at the time, it may have actually been relevant. From what I can tell, the National Enquirer began covering the story as early as October of 2007, back when Edwards was maybe not the front runner, but certainly a viable candidate for the nomination. While it saddens me to hear of yet another seemingly devoted husband who turned out not to be able to keep it in his pants (and did you see her?), I don't really think it's relevant to his ability to lead. However, it is relevant to his ability to win, and if all the allegations are true, he may have committed some crimes in using campaign funds to hire her and later to hush her up (plus it's pretty darn skeevy if he did convince his aide Andrew Young to claim paternity—good luck explaining that one to your wife and kids).

My point is, this story was worth something in October when the Enquirer first published it, and it's worth a little now with VP picks and Cabinet posts possibly in the works. But now that he's admitted it, even if he's still not being entirely forthcoming, is it really worth rehashing over and over?

By all means, feel free to lampoon him all you want. Lord knows how much enjoyment we've gotten out of Republican sex scandals recently, and I don't want to deny the other side their chance (Also, if you haven't seen this video, enjoy). But please don't keep trying to pass off harping on this story as "responsible journalism."

And for the record, I don't think this scandal hurts Obama. If it hurts any candidate, it should be McCain, the candidate who has experience—cheating on an unwell wife.