Did Team Clinton expose Edwards?

Fleet Street gets the gist:

Scratch John Edwards off the list of potential vice-presidential candidates. The former White House contender, who had been hoping to get the nod from Barack Obama, is in the midst of a full-blown sex scandal.
Every supermarket shopper knows that the preternaturally youthful former senator for North Carolina may have fathered a love child with a film-maker while Elizabeth, his saintly wife, is dying of cancer.

If the consequence of the Enquirer story is to scuttle Edwards as veep, why not suspect that the purpose of the story was to scuttle Edwards as veep? And if that was the purpose, then who had the motive?

This is invalid as logic, but as a gut-hunch, it feels pretty solid.

Everybody knows that the last thing in the world Team Obama wants is to have Hillary Clinton as his running mate. And among those who know it best are the Clintons themselves. The motive for torpedoing Edwards is obvious enough.

As James Carville likes to say, when you see a turtle sitting on top of a fencepost, you know he didn't crawl up there by himself, and when a sex scandal sinks an obvious rival for Democratic running mate while Hillary's sitting on top of a huge campaign debt, you start thinking: Jack Palladino, Terry Lenzner, Sidney Blumenthal ... Hey, whatever happened to Kathleen Willey's cat?

This is why you know that, if Barack Obama's ever cheated on his wife, he must have been very discreet about it. Trust me, if Obama had any disgruntled ex-girlfriends out there, we'd have heard about it shortly after Super Tuesday. Of course, it's still four weeks until the convention, so there's still time for any aggrieved erstwhile paramour to make a deal with the Clintons.

If a sex scandal ruins Obama between now and Denver, and his ex-girlfriend ends up as Hillary's ambassador to Costa Rica, don't say I didn't warn you.