It had the reckless feel of the best political appearances on “SNL,” from Jesse Jackson’s angry reading of “Green Eggs and Ham” to John McCain’s recent crack at a Streisand medley. Jackson and McCain, though, are self-styled mavericks who challenge convention, rather than strive to seem presidential. When McCain belted out an off-key “Evergreen,” he had already said that he never planned on another presidential run.

Gore, meanwhile, had seemed back on the campaign trail.. Watching him demurely tangle arms in a champagne toast with Parnell’s Lieberman while soaking in a sudsy bath, anyone who has ever watched five minutes of “Meet the Press” had to be thinking: This is hilarious, but does he think this makes us wish he was leading the war on terror? At the same time, my Salon colleague Jake Tapper was at a party thrown by an ex-Clinton official, and the crowd gathered around the TV. At the sight of the topless Gore, the wife of an Edwards adviser immediately pronounced: “That’s it. He’s not running.”

Sure enough, word would spread within the news cycle: Gore was out. On “60 Minutes,” he told an incredulous Leslie Stahl that “I want to contribute to ending the current administration,” but that “my best way of contributing to that result may not be as a candidate this time around.” He could have compared his favorability numbers with Bush’s (19 percent to 65 percent, according to a recent New York Times poll) and figured his best chance would be in 2008.

But it sounds like other Democratic Party members had taken a look at those numbers, the dismal sales of his book, or maybe the hostile reviews of his recent reemergence in the public eye by even liberal commentators, and concluded that the public that had given him the popular vote two years ago didn’t want him around much. He told Stahl that he thought “there are a lot of people within the Democratic Party who felt exhausted by [2000]. Who felt like, OK, I don’t wanna go through that again. And I’m frankly sensitive to that — to that feeling.”

So should that make you feel sad? If you like Al Gore mostly because he is not George W. Bush, whom you really really hate, well then go ahead, feel sad. (Minutes after the news broke, a spam e-mail to members of the media urged us to consider: “Was Gore Threatened?”) Supporters will also point out that in recent months Gore seemed the only Democratic leader willing to get his hands dirty, loudly questioning a possible war with Iraq, and going after Trent Lott when Tom Daschle and fellow Senate Democrats looked the other way.

But critics, including — maybe especially — those on the left, could just as eagerly claim it was all more posturing, that Gore could play the heartless, bloodless pol as well as anybody. He was the guy, after all, who used his keynote speech at the 1996 Democratic National Convention to melodramatically recount the tragic death of his sister Nancy to lung cancer — and advance his ticket’s popular attack on the tobacco industry. He was the guy who, having won the popular vote, took 18 months to come out swinging against Bush. Certainly Gore was unfairly savaged sometimes, but that never made him a saint. He tried to manipulate the media as much as anybody; he was just really bad at it.

Maybe that’s why he was so good on “SNL” — freed from the ugliness of campaigning, he could relax, be comfortable in his own skin. In the second-best sketch, played with “The West Wing” cast, Gore becomes unnaturally attached to the Oval Office set. Ultimately, Martin Sheen, Allison Janney and the rest of the cast fail to lure him away and leave him sitting at the fake presidential desk, until someone finally turns the lights off on him.

It seemed a little maudlin and overstated at the time, but now it suddenly seems poignant. And that doesn’t seem like a bad way to go out.

It all seemed very serious to me at the time, which is why I was astonished when the charges finally emerged. It seemed that federal prosecutors desperately wanted to find a way to legally punish Edwards for adultery, and their only hope of doing that was to reclassify hush money paid by private Edwards supporters directly to Rielle Hunter and Andrew Young as a campaign contributions, even though the money didn’t go to the campaign and “hush money for mistresses” has never before been treated like a traditional campaign expense. Luckily, the jury seems to have seen through the ruse, finding Edwards not guilty of one charge, and drawing a mistrial on the rest.

With the news of Karl Rove crowing about how he intends to spend $1 billion in untraceable funds to beat Obama in 2012, it looks particularly ridiculous for the government to waste resources on a showboat prosecution. Even the conservative news magazine National Review had to denounce the prosecution as a waste. John Edwards has been disgraced, humiliated and run out of politics. Bringing the full force of the law down on him on top of it all just seems greedy.

It’s become customary in politically obsessed circles for observers to preen about how they knew that Edwards was bad news all along. His lawyerly ways! His sentimental stories about growing up working class! His hair! How could his silly supporters not see him for the philandering phony he so clearly was?

Of course, a quick perusal of the John Edwards of 2007 demonstrates that this sort of hindsight owes more to revisionist wishful thinking than a correct assessment of the evidence at the time. Back then, the other potential Democratic nominees, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, were widely and correctly perceived as timid centrists who had a knee-jerk tendency to run from conflict the second conservatives ruffled their feathers. Edwards, on the other hand, spoke convincingly of how change couldn’t come from  “negotiation and compromise,” arguing that the idea that corporate interests would voluntarily give away their power is “a fantasy.” Long before the economic crash and Occupy Wall Street forced major Democratic politicians to address the question of growing inequality, Edwards’s famous “two Americas” rhetoric helped force the issue onto the table. Occupy boiled it down to the 1 Percent vs. the 99 Percent, but back in 2007, Edwards was taking cracks at “the very rich vs. everyone else.”

In the rush of headlines about Edwards’s despicable sexual behavior, what’s forgotten is how much his campaign haunted the primary contest between Clinton and Obama long after he dropped out. An early push in the campaign season from Edwards on healthcare reform set the tone for the rest of the election season on this issue. Edwards put out a plan for healthcare reform before the other candidates, forcing the other candidates to release competing plans that were likelier farther to the left than they were comfortable promising. It’s arguable that without the primary season pressure from the Edwards campaign, the initial gambit of the Democrats in the healthcare reform battle — one that included a public option — wouldn’t have been as strong, which would have meant an even weaker bill than the one that eventually was pushed past conservative Democratic opposition.

Because of this, no one was hurt worse by the revelation that Edwards was cheating on his well-loved wife than his most ardent supporters. If he’d been outed sooner, he would have destroyed not just his own candidacy but all the hard work in getting income inequality and progressive health care reform into the 2008 campaign. For those who take those issues very seriously, this felt less like a boneheaded mistake and more like a betrayal.

But being weak-willed and disappointing your supporters can’t be treated like a crime, or else most of D.C. should be yanked from their cocktail parties and tossed into the clink. Even those who’ll never be able to forgive Edwards for nearly destroying his legacy should be grateful for the good sense shown by the jury today. Let’s hope the Justice Department takes their lead and lets this one go.

Count three, the only one the jury ruled on, alleged that Edwards received excessive campaign donations from billionaire Bunny Mellon. Edwards will walk away as a free man.

The news of the verdict was bungled when, in a highly unusual move, the jury announced they had reached a verdict on the one count, which was misunderstood as a verdict on all counts. The initial announcement unleashed a tide of breaking news alerts and blaring chyrons on cable news outlets, only for it to be revealed minutes later that the jury was actually deadlocked on most of the counts and had only reached a verdict on one out of six. The jury had deliberated for eight days without a verdict in the case that experts had said would be difficult for the federal government to prove.

Such audits are required by law for federal campaigns that accept public financing, several of the commissioners noted.

“It is not at all unusual for a campaign to have a discrepancy,” said Ellen Weintraub, a commissioner. “It’s just a math problem and that’s how the math worked out.”

Federal auditors said about $2 million of the amount to be repayed was due to federal matching funds the Edwards campaign received but did not deserve. Auditors said the repayment also should include $141,808 in uncashed checks the campaign issued to donors that were never cashed, according to the audit.

The campaign got nearly $13 million in matching funds after it was approved by the Federal Election Commission in December 2007. Edwards dropped out of the race Jan. 30, 2008.

The Federal Election Commission’s ruling is the latest problem for Edwards, who was indicted last month on federal charges that he accepted illegal campaign contributions to hide an affair during his unsuccessful 2008 White House bid. Edwards, who was the 2004 vice presidential nominee, has pleaded not guilty to six felony charges that include allegations he filed false campaign reports to cover up the payments.

The Edwards campaign has continued to spend down its cash. It had about $2.6 million in cash on hand on June 30 after spending $183,000 during the previous three months.