AMERICA AT LARGEIN THE midst of this week's tawdry headlines, you find yourself thinking, wouldn't poetic justice be served if Elizabeth and Rielle just got together, chucked John Edwards right out of the house and decided to raise the children together?

A similar solution, after all, increasingly looms as the denouement to another soap opera, this one the boxing tale known as The Courtship of Verno Phillips, more about which anon.

Containing as it did the essential elements of betrayal and adultery, cash pay-offs and lying politicians, a wife dying of cancer, a hot mistress and a love child that may or may not have been fathered by the failed presidential candidate, the John Edwards saga proved such titillating news that it knocked both the Beijing Olympics and the events in Georgia off the front pages of American newspapers last week.

("Georgia?" the man-on-the-street was probably wondering. "Don't they play in the Southeastern Conference? And why are they bringing those tanks in now, when the Alabama game is still six weeks away?")

Suffice to say, the principal activity of many Americans over the past few days has involved energetically scraping away the last vestiges of those Kerry/Edwards bumperstickers that had been defiantly adorning their cars for the last four years.

The implosion of the former senator from North Carolina is particularly amusing in light of the moral high ground he claimed during the 1999 impeachment hearings, when he said of Bill Clinton's extramarital dalliances, "This president has shown a remarkable disrespect of his office, for the moral dimensions of leadership, for his friends, for his wife, for his precious daughter."

As the whole world knows by now, Senator Edwards has acknowledged his affair with the woman who now calls herself Rielle Hunter, who was paid more than €700,000 by Edwards' presidential campaign to produce videos of dubious quality.

Since the networks are literally fighting one another to get any credible candidate on camera, it seems highly curious that one of Edwards' stature would have deemed it necessary to pay somebody to produce footage, but that is a question for another day.

Ms Hunter, it has also been revealed, was previously known as Lisa Druck, more familiar as the ex-girlfriend of fast-lane novelist Jay McInerney. McInerney has confirmed that "Alison Poole", the protagonist of his Story of My Life (a character he describes as "cocaine addled" and "sexually voracious") is based upon Ms Hunter, née Druck.

Rielle Hunter herself acknowledged having been "formerly a party girl", or, as one New York television station put it in the captioned crawl accompanying its newscast, "formally a party girl".

In this day and age, a politician cheating on his wife, even a wife afflicted with terminal cancer, and continuing to lie about it, strikes us as just one more dog-bites-man story. What separates this one from the pack is the possibility that Ms Hunter's initial employment, and subsequent silence, may both have been purchased with campaign funds - money which had come in €20 and €30 contributions in response to Edwards' grassroots pledge to eradicate poverty.

Democratic operatives are understandably still shuddering over the episode. What if this bombshell had burst after Barack Obama had chosen Edwards as his running mate? What, God forbid, if Edwards had been the nominee? Some Hillary Clinton partisans are now grousing that, had Edwards come clean about this stuff before the primaries, the white-trash vote in Iowa would not have been fragmented and the Dragon Lady might have been the nominee.

Neither did the mainstream press exactly cover itself with glory in its coverage of this episode, one it had ignored as "tabloid trash" right up until the moment the National Inquirer caught Edwards in a late-night visitation with Rielle Hunter and the four-month-old baby at a Los Angeles hotel last month.

Even in acknowledging his affair with Hunter, Edwards has continued to deny paternity of the "love child", and even offered to take a paternity test - a notably empty gesture, since Rielle (as one might expect of a woman who, with no visible means of support, is living in a €2.5 million house paid for by the former finance director of Edwards's campaign) says she won't allow the baby to be tested anyway.

Edwards's offer calls to mind a similar gesture by Gary Hart, who was the leading candidate for the 1988 Democratic nomination when the former divinity student threw down his challenge to the media: "Go ahead, follow me around. You'll be very bored."

"We did. We weren't," said NBC's John Chancellor a few days later after pictures surfaced of Hart cavorting with a hot young model named Donna Rice, his guest on a Miami-based luxury yacht named Monkey Business. Mrs Hart was not amused, Democratic voters even less so.

Born in Belize, Verno Phillips has been boxing professionally for over 20 years. Widely considered to be on the downside of his career, he revived his fortunes this March when he won a split decision over Cory Spinks for a world light-middleweight title for the third time, 14 years after he had won his first.

Given his age (39 in November) and his implicit vulnerability (he has lost 10 times; no current world champion has lost more than six), he immediately became the object of affection for contenders and pretenders alike.

On the night John Duddy beat Charlie Howe in Boston in June, his handlers revealed the Derry middleweight's plans to drop down to the 11st division, and specifically targeted Phillips.

Last month Irish Ropes sources reported that a Phillips-Duddy fight had been agreed to "in principle" by Verno's promoter, Artie Pelullo.

A few days later, Pelullo confirmed to a Belfast newspaper that "as far as I am concerned, we have a deal" for Duddy's fight.

"We have yet to sign, but when someone gives me their word, then as far as I'm concerned the deal is done," said Pelullo then.

But in boxing, as in politics (and marriage), the principals sometimes speak with forked tongues. Just a few days later, Pelullo entered into clandestine talks with promoter Lou DiBella about a fight between Phillips and Ronald Hearns.

Hearns, the son of the legend Thomas Hearns, is 19-0, though he lacks his father's big punch, and his roster of victims is even less impressive than Duddy's.

By the time word leaked out of Pellullo's double-dealing, negotiations had already cooled, and while the Phillips-Hearns bout isn't dead yet, it is on a respirator.

Instead of talking to Pelullo, Irish Ropes and DiBella are now talking to one another, and Pelullo's prospects may wind up approximating those of John Edwards in his own bedroom.

Duddy and Hearns may now fight in a battle more television- friendly than either man against the aging Phillips. There is also the distinct possibility the fight could wind up being tagged an official eliminator, a process that could result in Pelullo being frozen out of a title bout against the winner via a purse bid.

A collection of the best of this column, American at Large, is available in bookshops.

All proceeds in aid of Our Lady's Children's Hospital, Crumlin.