One of the saddest falls from grace among many in this category of the blog was that of John Edwards, whose hopes for our nation's highest office were wiped out by an affair he had with one of his campaign staffers, Rielle Hunter.
The sadness was not so much in the disappointment suffered by Edwards himself, but in the anguish caused his wife and the mother of his four children, Elizabeth Edwards, cancer sufferer.
John Edwards became known to the nation as Sen. John Kerry's vice presidential running mate in the 2004 election. Having lost that one, Edwards returned to the state he once served in the U.S. Senate, North Carolina, and in 2001, accepted a position at the Chapel Hill School of Law.
Having retained his hopes of making it into the White House, Edwards became a Democratic candidate for president in the 2008 race. His Republican opponents derided him as "The Breck Girl" due to his shiny mop of hair, which made him look younger than his actual years.
In his younger years, Edwards had become the most successful plaintiffs' lawyer in North Carolina and had his own highly profitable firm in Raleigh.
His undoing as a candidate stemmed from his affair with Hunter, which he initially denied, then finally confirmed. Americans' hearts went out to his wife, still fighting cancer.
A child born to Hunter has never been proved to be Edwards', but in a seamy twist to the tale, Edwards' aide Andrew Young (not the one from Atlanta) at first claimed that he was the father of Hunter's child, then recanted that story, saying Edwards had pressured him to make the bogus claim.
It has not been a pretty story, to say the very least.
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