The decline and fall of political figures is one of the least pretty things to witness. But I’m not thinking about Obama now, since I think he still has a second and even third act in him. I’m thinking about John Edwards.

I used to like John Edwards. A lot, actually. His placement on the ticket was the only way I was able to actually vote for John Kerry, who I found politically tone-deaf  in the way John McCain would be in 2008. Making the 2004 election a referendum on Vietnam was simply stupid and lost Kerry the election.

But John Edwards easy populism was both engaging and believable as a counter-point to Kerry’s heavy-handed elitism cum militarism. I liked what Edwards had to say and what’s more, I thought he meant it. Did he get his ass handed to him in the debate with Dick Cheney? Sure. But who wouldn’t have? Not too many people have gone up against Satan and won, after all.

I still liked Edwards in 2007. His message continued to include a segment of the population everyone else seemed to ignore: the poor. He seemed in touch in ways that were compelling. It was clearly the wrong year for him, but I thought he’d end up in either a Clinton or Obama administration in a serious post like Attorney General.

I was surprised when he and wife Elizabeth announced that her cancer was back, but he was staying in the race. It was the first time I felt a frisson of  discomfiture. Surely they weren’t putting politics above her very survival? Or–the thought crossed my mind more than once—were they counting on a sympathy vote?

The press conference left me with a feeling of ickiness that only intensified in the coming weeks. By the time Edwards seemed to be tag-teaming Obama to take down “the girl,” Hillary Clinton, in New Hampshire, I had started to feel real dislike for him. There was a combination of arrogance and desperation that I was beginning to see in his attitude, which I wrote about in a column after New Hampshire. It was, I noted, just a matter of time before he had the sense, since it was too late for grace, to withdraw.

He did–later than he should have done, and with a kind of nasty fanfare that put a sour note to all the good he might have done supporting either Obama or Hillary.

And then he held them hostage. Waiting to use his endorsement to do the most harm to one of them—and secure a solid place for himself with the other. It was creepy and not a little pathetic.

And that was all before the bombshell hit that he’d been having an affair with a staffer, paid her enormous amounts of money, snuck into hotel rooms after hours to see her–and that the woman had a new baby. The unraveling had begun in earnest.

The lesson of the Lewinsky scandal should have been more than cautionary for every cheating politico: Don’t lie about it. When half the world has a camera/video phone, what level of arrogance do you have to have to think you can lie and get away with it?

So today the Edwards’ have officially split. Elizabeth Edwards told People that she’d “had enough.”

I don’t feel the least bit sorry for her. Three and a half years ago I would have felt sorry for her as I would have for any woman who was battling cancer and whose husband was cheating on her with a much younger woman. But not now.

I never like to see women be humiliated. I watched Gayle Haggard on Oprah yesterday explaining how she loves the straying gay Ted too much to leave him (not coincidententally she was plugging her book Why I Stayed).  It was cringeworthy, to be sure. And made more so by Ted asserting that he wasn’t gay anymore and that there was ample proof of that, wink wink, nudge nudge, ew ew.

Elizabeth Edwards was more refined, or so it seemed. She had a classiness and a sweetness that belied her hard-edged political ambitions for her husband. As for Edwards, he was clearly being punished and it showed. While he didn’t seem capable of true contrition, he certainly seemed sorry. Living with St. Elizabeth could not have been easy.

But what neither Edwards seemed to get, and why I have no sympathy, empathy or anything but anger toward them, was that they both colluded  in the most hubristic fashion to lie to the American people for their own personal goals. Both of them wanted the White House or at the very least, the closest they could get to it. And in concert–very much as a couple, not as estranged partners–they decided to stand in a press conference together and lie. And then lie again, and again and again–on Oprah and every other TV show they could get onto.

Did Elizabeth Edwards really not believe that Frances Quinn was her husband’s child? She told Oprah the baby “doesn’t look like my children.” But did she look like her father?

What if John Edwards had won the primary? What if he had come as close to winning as Hillary did? How much damage were both John and Elizabeth Edwards willing to impart on the Democratic Party and the country to advance their own political ambitions?

It’s ugly to watch a marriage fall apart. It’s ugly to watch a political figure who once shone tarnish almost overnight. But one thing we have learned–without the help of F. Scott Fitzgerald–is that in American politics there are indeed second acts if one is honest and forthright and does some modicum of penance and tries not to screw the citizenry the way they screwed their spouse.

The Edwards’ are not those people. The Edwards’ still don’t get it. John thinks he can acknowledge his daughter publicly two years after the fact and all will be forgiven. Elizabeth thinks she can pull the victim card yet again and we will buy it just because People  put her on their cover.

No one doubts at this point that John Edwards is a cad. He seems incapable of telling the truth, even now, and it’s the children who are suffering. And Elizabeth seems to have left her marriage solely because there was no way to redeem it publicly. She didn’t leave three and a half years ago, she left this week when Andrew Young’s tell all book became available with rumors of a sex tape.

One could say that the Edwards’ deserve each other. One could say that they both need a good ass-whipping and a lesson in civic responsibility and pride. One could say that their children are the real victims here—and they are. But mostly one can only say as bad as things might shake out to be after Obama gives his State of the Union speech, at least John Edwards didn’t win the nomination. Obama still has time for another act, even if the Edwards’ do not.—VAB