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Excerpting from the future bestseller "Game Change", co-authors John Heilemann and Mark Halperin divulge a 10-page preview in New York Magazine that devastates John Edwards.

Quite a tale of not one but two monsters: both John Edwards and his wife Elizabeth (portrayed by the media as a pitiable victim, but revealed as an cunning hatchetwoman who demeaned and humiliated John Edwards and his staff every chance she got).

Some juicynesses...the fateful meeting of the future love birds...

“My friends insist you’re John Edwards,” Rielle Hunter said. “I tell them no way—you’re way too handsome.”

“No, ma’am. I’m John Edwards,” the candidate replied.

“No way! I don’t believe you!”

The unmasking of Mrs. Edwards...

The denizens of the valley of staff were astonished by the narcissism that had infused their candidate. But for a long time, they continued slaving in the service of the illusion at the core of Edwards’s political appeal: that he remained the same humble, aw-shucks son of a mill worker he’d always been. The cognitive dissonance was enormous, sure, but they were used to that. Because for years they’d been living with an even bigger lie—the lie of Saint Elizabeth.

...

During the 2004 race, Elizabeth badgered and berated John’s advisers around the clock. She called Nick Baldick, his campaign manager, an idiot. She accused David Axelrod, his (and later Obama’s) media consultant, of lying to her and insisted that he be stripped of the responsibility for making the campaign’s TV ads. She would stay up late scouring the Web, pulling down negative stories and blog items about her husband, forwarding them with vicious messages to the communications team. She routinely unleashed profanity-laced tirades on conference calls. “Why the fuck do you think I’d want to go sit outside a Wal-Mart and hand out leaflets?” she snarled at the schedulers.

Rielle Hunter's capture of weak-minded John Edwards...

There was nothing legit, however, about Hunter’s behavior. It was freaky, wildly inappropriate, and all too visible. She flirted outlandishly with every man she met. She spouted New Age babble, rambled on about astrology and reincarnation, and announced to people she had just met, “I’m a witch.” But mostly, she fixated on Edwards. She told him that he had “the power to change the world,” that “the people will follow you.” She told him that he could be as great a leader as Gandhi or Martin Luther King Jr. She told him, “You’re so real. You just need to get your staff out of your way.” She reinforced everything he already believed, told him everything he wanted to hear.

Edwards swooned.

Lying and covering up his affair, first to his staff...

Scher was next to raise the issue, traveling up to New York from Washington and meeting Edwards in his room at the Regency.

“So you think I’m fucking her?” Edwards asked.

Well, are you? Scher pressed.

Edwards said he wasn’t.

...then to his wife...

Always jealous of anyone, male or female, who seemed close to John, Elizabeth watched Hunter working the room. The expression on Mrs. Edwards’s face said: Who is this woman? And what is she doing here? Icily, Elizabeth asked Hunter to back off. “Excuse me, we’re trying to have some privacy,” she said.

Then the first Enquirer story, the one everyone ignored (especially the Democrat-loving Main Stream Media...

Altman called David Pecker, the Enquirer’s publisher. We have evidence, Pecker told Altman. “This thing could have a big impact on this guy, so let’s be triply sure,” Altman said. Pecker replied that he already was.

A little later, Altman’s phone buzzed again. This time it was Elizabeth, in tears.

You must do something about this, she begged. It’s cruel, it’s unfair, and it’s untrue. This is way too much for me. I can’t take it. It’s killing our family. It’s killing me.

Altman was torn up by Elizabeth’s distress. But his hands were tied. “I’m really sorry, Mrs. Edwards,” he said. “I’m really, really sorry.”

Elizabeth's breakdown...

At the terminal, the couple fought in the passenger waiting area. They fought outside in the parking lot. Elizabeth was sobbing, out of control, incoherent. As their aides tried to avert their eyes, she tore off her blouse, exposing herself. “Look at me!” she wailed at John and then staggered, nearly falling to the ground.

John tried to bring down the temperature, remaining calm and impassive, but his apprent standoffishness only seemed to infuriate and disorient Elizabeth more. Finally, after talking to her doctor on the phone, Edwards sent his wife home and flew off to South Carolina.

At this point, late in 2007, Edwards was still a viable Democrat contender, trying to influence his way into a guaranteed VP position at the least; still holding out hope that he could secure the nomination. Until the second National Enquirer story...

Some Edwards aides believed John’s denials, thought the story was too far out to be true. But others decided to stop spinning the candidate’s disavowals to the media, so certain were they that their boss was lying. Too many of them knew that Young had talked openly about having had a vasectomy a few years back. A bit of math and a glance at a calendar made clear that Hunter had gotten pregnant around June, within months of the recurrence of Elizabeth’s cancer.

After the story broke, things went from bad to worse. John and Elizabeth were fighting all the time, sometimes all night long. On more than one occasion, she announced to the staff that she could no longer speak in public on her husband’s behalf or stay in the same hotel with him. Once, in the middle of the night, she woke up a trip director and commanded, Get me out of here! I’m not campaigning for this asshole another day!

Edwards failed in the primaries, but held out hope for some sort of position in either the Obama or Clinton administration...

So Edwards sat there, perched on the fence, squandering his leverage. Making the situation all the more absurd was the birth in late February of Hunter’s baby, a girl she named Frances Quinn—a development that Edwards somehow convinced himself would not preclude his being nominated and confirmed to run the Department of Justice.

Finally, in May, after suffering a blowout loss to Clinton in the West Virginia primary, Obama phoned Edwards and briefly managed to pierce his bubble of delusion. Tomorrow is the last day when your endorsement is going to make a difference, he told Edwards. And what would Edwards get in return? Not much more than a prime-time speaking slot at the Democratic convention.

...a speaking spot that Obama decided, later, to revoke. Because by then the tawdry details were exposed; Edwards was a liar, a jerk, an egomaniac, and, as termed by his own wife...

As for Elizabeth Edwards, she is reportedly now urging John to accede to Hunter’s demands and take responsibility for his paternity of Frances Quinn—a dramatic and no doubt painful turnabout from her position eighteen months ago. Confronted then with the Enquirer photo of her husband cuddling Hunter’s baby, she insisted to Palmieri that she still believed he was not the father. “I have to believe it,” Elizabeth said. “Because if I don’t, it means I’m married to a monster.”

No, dearie, you're married to a Democrat.

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