Jeralyn: "The public shaming to which the prosecutors subjected Edwards was unconscionable."

The former senator and V.P. / presidential candidate did that to himself, and all by himself. Nobody forced him to step out and cheat on his ailing wife, or to get on national TV and falsely deny that he had in fact fathered Rielle Hunter's daughter.

By most all accounts and standards, this was a terribly tawdry and pathetic story, in which nobody comes out of it smelling like a rose -- even 102-year-old Bunny Mellon, who I think I'd really like, were I to ever meet her.

The federal prosecutors didn't tell us anything that we did not either already know or at least suspect. Rather, they proceeded to restate the painfully obvious, ad nauseum and in tediously salacious detail, even though Edwards' personal behavior and transgressions it really had little or nothing to do with the case they were ostensibly trying in court.

And frankly, Jeralyn, I fully agree with you that federal prosecutors should be ashamed of themselves, for seeking to make a federal case out of what was really nothing more than a mutually consensual sexual affair.

They managed to do what I heretofore didn't think was possible, i.e., successfully recast John Edwards as an unfortunate victim of prosecutorial zealotry and overreach. And by doing so, they needlessly inflicted a great deal of emotional distress upon his children and aging parents, who really didn't need to hear and know all the sordid details of his extramarital affair, any more than did the rest of us.

So, while I'm still sort of angry at Edwards -- and honestly, also at myself as well, for allowing myself to be willingly bamboozled by this blow-dried smooth talker -- now that this is over, I'm very pleased that he's now been exonerated on all charges, and I truly bear him no ill will and wish him all the best.

Edwards certainly has his work cut out for him on the home front. The best thing he can do now is to step off the national stage, and try to do an awful lot of fence mending.

He needs to make amends with the surviving members of his family, and do right by all his children, especially his two younger children by Elizabeth. After all, they're adolescents who've recently lost their mother, and they really need a daddy right now, a lot more than -- in admitted retrospect -- we ever needed him in Washington or on the presidential campaign trail.