It was the sort of story that TV political pundits would sacrifice a welfare mother’s child and/or Cadillac for: Yesterday, the New York Times dropped a story about John McCain’s cozy relationships with lobbyists. I know: Snooze, right?

But no! Pretty much all of that stuff got lost in the shuffle, mainly because this was the story’s second paragraph:

Vicki Iseman, “(a) female lobbyist had been turning up with him at fund-raisers, visiting his offices and accompanying him on a client’s corporate jet. Convinced the relationship had become romantic, some of his top advisers intervened to protect the candidate from himself — instructing staff members to block the woman’s access, privately warning her away and repeatedly confronting him, several people involved in the campaign said on the condition of anonymity.”

McCain’s a bona fide American hero, but I don’t really want images of him firing up the Barry White records and pouring glasses of Reunite burned into my retinas. Nonetheless, so began hours of bloviating on the cable news channels (This is so big, Keith Olbermann has jettisoned “Oddball” two nights running!): Might they have done the nasty? Isn’t it creepy that Iseman looks a whole lot like a younger version of McCain’s wife?

Oh, and somewhat more substantial questions: What did it mean for McCain’s Presidential campaign? What did the timing of the story – it dropped now, though the Times had much of it back in December, before the primaries even began – mean? How might Mitt Romney’s campaign have fared had this come out sooner? Could mutual disdain for the Times be the impetus to bring McCain into the far-right conservative fold? What is the august New York Times doing, running a front-page story merely hinting at a politician’s affair and citing only two blind sources?

Not really on the table, as far as the pundits were concerned: How much does McCain’s relationship with lobbyists compromise his policy-making? ABC News’ The Note today declared:

“This is not (as the Times headline might have you believe) about ‘self-confidence on ethics.’ It’s about sex. It’s a storyline that at this time is filled with innuendo – and suggestions that the Times was bullied into running the story on only what MIGHT have been an eight-year-old affair by the controversy that it wasn’t being published.”

McCain’s huffily offended senior aide Mark Salter echoed that theme, declaring to Time Magazine:

"They did this because the The New Republic was going to run a story that looked back at the infighting there, the Judy Miller-type power struggles – they decided that they would rather smear McCain than suffer a story that made the New York Times newsroom look bad.”

Actually, the Washington Post’s follow on the Times’ story was a little more clear and vaguely more damning on the Iseman problem:

“John Weaver, who was McCain's closest confidant until leaving his current campaign last year, said he met with Vicki Iseman at the Center Cafe at Union Station and urged her to stay away from McCain. Association with a lobbyist would undermine his image as an opponent of special interests, aides had concluded. …

“The aide said the message to Iseman that day at Union Station in 1999 was clear: ‘She should get lost.’ The aide said Iseman stood up and left angrily.”

Also today, The New Republic uncorked that aforementioned story it had been working on for a while on the fact that the Times had been sitting on the story, and the back-and-forth crabbing it had created within the newsroom:

“The publication of the article capped three months of intense internal deliberations at the Times over whether to publish the negative piece and its most explosive charge about the affair. It pitted the reporters investigating the story, who believed they had nailed it, against executive editor Bill Keller, who believed they hadn't. It likely cost the paper one investigative reporter, who decided to leave in frustration. And the Times ended up publishing a piece in which the institutional tensions about just what the story should be are palpable.”

Keller spoke to NPR today, trying to dismantle that New Republic story a smidgen. On the paper’s policy in using anonymous sources:

“Obviously, you would like to have not just on-the-record sources, but documentary evidence for everything you put in the newspaper, but if you refused to publish stories that included anonymously sourced information, most of the most important things we know about how our country is run would not published – there are things you just cannot find without being willing to protect your sources.”

On why McCain’s relationship to Iseman was relevant and newsworthy for a story:

“He [McCain] came back from Vietnam a hero, entered into public life and then was felled by the Keating five scandal, if you read his books, it was clearly a humiliating event for him. And he subsequently built his political life on themes of redemption, reform, you know, rectitude, if you will – and became the scourge of lobbyists, the champion of campaign finance reform, and so on, in Washington. Yet, according to some people who knew him best, he can be surprisingly careless about his reputation, and that’s what I think this, his relationship with this particular lobbyist illustrates, although I think there’s a lot of other illustrations as well in the piece.”

Still, no justification for playing up the sex angle. But then, all the pundits can explain that to you.

The right, of course, are questioning the timing of the piece. But when would they have preferred it to have run? Before the primaries began, thereby effectively kicking McCain out of the running? Closer to the general election, thereby inflicting a potentially mortal wound to the Republicans’ White House hopes? Wait, I know: Never. Depending on what you think about McCain, the Times story is either meticulously researched or thin and baseless innuendo.

And we still have nine more months of this circus until election day, plenty of time for an Obama bombshell or Hillary hair-raiser. Those with delicate stomachs might be encouraged to sit this one out.