The scandal America doesn’t want to know about

Not for the first time in recent political history, an American standing in the checkout line at a supermarket is better informed on a hot issue of the day than the nation's elite who send their maids to buy food and get their news from the New York Times and the Washington Post.

So far as the precise historical record goes, former US senator John Edwards, 55, began his slide into public scandal back on August 25, 2007, when the New York Post's Page 6 gossip column ran a blind item asking: "Which political candidate enjoys visiting New York because he has a girlfriend who lives downtown? The pol tells her he'll marry her when his current wife is out of the picture."

At the time, the millionaire lawyer Edwards was still in contention for the Democratic nomination despite well-founded gibes that his populist rhetoric sounded odd when spouted from a man who had $400 haircuts

and a 28,000 sq ft house in his home state of North Carolina. The Post's item kicked off a round of speculation on the web, homing in on the chilling phrase 'out of the picture' - taken by some to refer to Edward's wife Liz, terminally ill with breast cancer.

Soon the blogosphere's sleuths were panting along a trail that led back to a Newsweek item in late 2006 reporting that a 44-year-old film-maker, Rielle Hunter, formerly named Lisa Druck, was doing a series of cine-verite videos of candidate Edwards, paid for by a pro-Edwards group called One America.

Edwards and the self-confessed hard-partying Hunter had met in a bar in New York. By late September 2007, Sam Stein at the Huffington Post wrote about the odd disappearance of the videos, for which, so campaign records showed, she'd received $114,461. Stein didn't speculate on the reasons the videos had disappeared.

On October 28 the National Enquirer ran a front-page expose under the headline 'Presidential candidate John Edwards is caught in a shocking mistress scandal that