The Washington Post has issued a post-mortem on the career of John Edwards (“American Dream is Irrevocably Undone”) and finds tragedy and pathos. “The man born Johnny Reid Edwards had it. Great gobs of potential.” He might have been, the Post laments, “a great husband, could have been an enduring statesman … president.”

But fate intervened. With his indictment on misuse of campaign funds last week, “America witnessed the latest distasteful episode in … (the) fall from grace of a political comet.”