Politico: Freaky-deaky Edwards love child scandal even freaky-deakier than thought

Add six cups of freaky, a quart of deaky, stir well, then let chill overnight. The next day: Voila. If you’re reading this on the east coast, where it’s already past nine, I’d advise turning on a light and wrapping yourself in a quilt or something. The creep-out factor is off the charts.

To refresh your memory about the cast of characters here, there’s Silky Pony, his wife St. Elizabeth, Silky’s baba mama Rielle Hunter, and loyal aide/gopher/fall guy/number-one fan Andrew Young, who initially claimed paternity of the love child to cover for his hero.

“He believed that Edwards was the next Kennedy,” said a person who was close to Young. “It’s not enough to say that he idolized the guy — there’s something deeper and weirder than that.”

Elizabeth Edwards, in a thinly veiled portrait of Young in “Resilience,” her book on surviving cancer and her husband’s affair, compared him explicitly with Rielle Hunter, her husband’s former mistress…

She described an “obsessed” and “overbearing” young volunteer who “volunteered for everything, making himself indispensable,” taking care of cars and dry cleaning — an unmistakable portrait, people close to her say, of Young…

“What we always said about Andrew was that there would always be a place for him as long as John and Elizabeth didn’t want to get their hands dirty and deal with the painters and yard people and get their own groceries,” said a former Edwards aide who was among several who agitated more than once to have Young fired. “It was not a healthy arrangement,” the former aide said…

Elizabeth Edwards, meanwhile, had been leaving messages on Young’s and Young’s wife’s voice mail, two sources say Young told them, demanding that he reassert his paternity to clear the cloud over her husband. The Youngs returned to Chapel Hill, and they heard that Elizabeth Edwards had been spreading the rumor that, among other things, Young had stolen her late son Wade’s baseball card collection, which he denied…

And Young, with all the fury of a spurned lover, may be holding out yet another threat to his old idol, if it comes to that: an explicit videotape, two people who have seen it said, of Edwards and Hunter together.

“It’s his hole card,” said the source.

No pun intended, I’m sure. To encourage you to read the whole sordid piece, I’ve bolded just a few of the many ways in which author Ben Smith none-too-subtly suggests that there was something … amiss somehow about Young’s hero worship of Edwards. Click through and keep a running tally as you go. Irresistible exit question via Ace: Given his intense “admiration” for Edwards, just how did Young come to possess the alleged videotape? Did he swipe it from Silky’s secret stash? Or is there another explanation?

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