Michelle Malkin is reporting this morning that John Edwards will finally admit what we’ve known all along — he’s the daddy.

It is about time.

But I’m going to go where smarter people probably would not.

As Michelle quotes from the book Game Change, “Confronted then with the Enquirer photo of her husband cuddling Hunter’s baby, she insisted to Palmieri that she still believed he was not the father. ‘I have to believe it,’ Elizabeth said. ‘Because if I don’t, it means I’m married to a monster.’”

Having read the stuff about the relationship between Elizabeth and John Edwards, I think if Elizabeth Edwards wants to see what the monster looks like in their marriage, she should look in the mirror.

I am in no way excusing or justifying John Edwards cheating on his wife. But I was really shocked that the man who admitted he has “increasingly egocentric and narcissistic” is married to someone more narcissistic than himself. Elizabeth comes across as a demeaning witch.

She belittles her husband. She belittles his work. She belittles his family. She belittles his education.

Neither John nor Elizabeth Edwards comes off looking flattering. John Edwards has, thankfully, been driven from the public stage, hopefully permanently. Elizabeth is still sometimes trotted out as a leftwing hero for a bunch of socialist causes, but she too should be dismissed. From the book:

With her husband, she could be intensely affectionate or brutally dismissive. At times subtly, at times blatantly, she was forever letting John know that she regarded him as her intellectual inferior. She called her spouse a ’hick’ in front of other people and derided his parents as rednecks. One time, when a friend asked if John had read a certain book, Elizabeth burst out laughing. ’Oh, he doesn’t read books,’ she said. ’I’m the one who reads books.’

Guess he got his revenge. If the psychobabble is true that men marry their mothers, Edwards’ mother must have been a piece of work.

What is equally disturbing is how the press continued to portray the Edwards family as some sort of loving genteel southern family still tied to their working class roots. It is clear nothing is further from the truth and it is equally clear at least two reporters knew it — I venture to guess more knew it than will admit it.

Instead of a genteel southern family, we’ve got the War of the Roses. Someone please queue the falling chandelier.