Two months ago, when some potentially incriminating voicemails emerged, Salon’s Justin Elliott spoke to North Carolina journalist Steve Daniels, who explained some of the finer points of an indictment that was then hypothetical — but now appears inevitable. Daniels told Salon:

A federal grand jury in Raleigh has been investigating this whole scandal since January of 2009. The key question is, were campaign finance laws broken? What did John Edwards know about the people who were funding the coverup, primarily Bunny Mellon and Fred Baron? According to [Edwards aide] Andrew Young, Fred Baron, who was a wealthy Texas trial lawyer, used his personal fortune to help fund the coverup of the Rielle Hunter affair and the baby. And Mellon, according to Young, sent $700,000 in personal checks hidden in candy boxes to help fund the coverup. Young says he used that money to keep Hunter in hiding.

Another key question is, what did John Edwards know about the use of that money? Did he know that these donations were being used to help hide the affair? In an interview with ABC News, John Edwards said that if anybody donated money, he was unaware of it. What the new voice-mail messages seem to suggest is, he was in frequent contact with Fred Baron and with Bunny Mellon, and may have known about their involvement in the coverup. Andrew Young says very definitively that he was working at the direction of both John Edwards and Fred Baron. If that is the case, that could be a violation of federal law.

The crucial detail, Daniels emphasized, is that Edwards must be proven to have knowingly used the money to “further his presidential aspirations.” To prove he did so, prosecutors will have to demonstrate “that the coverup was central to electing John Edwards president.” That may seem fairly straightforward, but there are some complications:

If these people gave a donation to someone who was running for president, but not directly to the official John Edwards 2008 presidential campaign, there could still be a violation of campaign finance law — even though the money was not directly in that Edwards for President kitty.

In a 2008 interview, Edwards categorically denied participation in — and even knowledge of — any coverup, telling Bob Woodruff:

“I’ve never paid a dime of money to any of the people that are involved. I’ve never asked anybody to pay a dime of money, never been told that any money’s been paid. Nothing has been done at my request. So if the allegation is that somehow I participated in the payment of money, that is a lie, an absolute lie.” 

Everyone already knows everything about that election. It will be fun, I guess, to watch famous people pretend to be other famous people. For a while. But that particular pleasure usually wears off about three minutes into your average “SNL” political cold open. And we are all already intimately familiar with nearly everything our dramatis personae will do and say.

I, for one, would rather watch a film dramatizing the 1948 election. Or 1876! Almost any close election that happened prior to the age of 24-hour cable news and blogs would be infinitely more interesting to watch unfold on television than the one everyone in the nation just sat through.

But if we have to watch the election we all just witnessed unfold in real time, must we watch it through the lens of the inane reporting of Mark Halperin and John Heilemann? Why not adapt David Remnick’s Obama book? The election book by Haynes Johnson and Dan Balz? Eric Boehlert’s “The Bloggers on the Bus”? Jonathan Alter’s “The Promise”? Or even the Newsweek instabook?

Those are all well-reported and insightful works. They all have “scoops” and dramatic behind-the-scenes stories. And none of them were written (or co-written) by an odious troll like Mark Halperin, the obsequious chronicler of yesterday’s Beltway conventional wisdom.

There’s also no other book on the 2008 election that so nakedly portrays the now-departed Elizabeth Edwards as a crazy harridan she-devil — which should make for either some incredibly uncomfortable scenes or some hasty revisions to the adapted screenplay. (Of course, nearly every woman is portrayed by the authors as horrible, from Edwards to Hillary Clinton to, yes, Sarah Palin.)

“Game Change” is written from the perspective of the perspectiveless, representing the views of Washington lifers for whom politics is nothing but a game of big, clashing personalities. It’s a book where rumors of Bill Clinton’s infidelity are just as important as — or perhaps more important than — the financial crisis.

I realize that clashing personalities makes for better television than effective organizing and changing demographics, but what kind of masochist wants to watch actors pretending to be Mark Penn and Howard Wolfson yell at each other for any length of time?

Of course, the absolute worst part of this entire film enterprise is the smirk that will be glued to Halperin’s smug face the next time he shows up to say nothing of any import or relevance on “Hardball.”

Halperin had probably already been booked before the news broke — perhaps to elaborate on the thesis of his most recent fact-free column — but it was still incredibly insensitive to have him actually speak about the life of Elizabeth Edwards within minutes of the news of her death.

“A very tough person” is what Halperin called her today, on “Hardball.” When she was still with us, here’s what the relentlessly smarmy Halperin wrote about Elizabeth Edwards:

What the world saw in Elizabeth: A valiant, determined, heroic every-woman. What the Edwards insiders saw: An abusive, intrusive, paranoid, condescending crazy-woman.

While usually careful to attribute the characterization to “insiders,” Halperin’s “Game Change” painted Edwards as, in Jason Linkins’ words, “a shrill monster,” guilty primarily of the crime of being intelligent and ambitious.

“The culture kicked Elizabeth Edwards when she was already down,” Jonathan Alter just wrote at the Daily Beast. And Mark Halperin was an integral part of that culture. Having him on to speak about her was disgusting.

Edwards first went public with her breast cancer diagnosis after her husband’s defeated bid for the vice presidency in 2004. After an initially successful course of chemo and treatment, she announced in 2007 that the cancer had returned — and had spread to her lymph nodes and bones. Three years later, it’s now reportedly metastisized to her liver. Without referring directly to her condition, she posted Monday on Facebook:

“You all know that I have been sustained throughout my life by three saving graces – my family, my friends, and a faith in the power of resilience and hope. These graces have carried me through difficult times and they have brought more joy to the good times than I ever could have imagined … It isn’t possible to put into words the love and gratitude I feel to everyone who has and continues to support and inspire me every day. To you I simply say: you know.”

We do. Many of us know all too intimately. Coincidentally, on Monday I was on the phone with one of my best friends, talking about these very things. Debbie and I were roommates in college. We were bridesmaids at each other’s weddings. We even shared the exact due date with our firstborns. And this year, we have shared something new in common. Three months to the day after my diagnosis of malignant melanoma, she e-mailed me to say she’d been diagnosed with an aggressive form of ovarian cancer. Always such a copycat.

Debbie is embarking now on a strenuous course of chemo, and as we chatted Monday with the easy camaraderie of two old friends who have so much in common — two kids the same age, an affinity for Pee Wee Herman — we talked also about the view from inside this strange and scary place. “This changes who you are,” I said. “It makes you have to change how you think of yourself.”

“I don’t want to be Cancer Lady. I don’t want to be the bald lady people feel sorry for,” she replied. I told her how after my head surgery I had to wear a scarf for almost four months, how I hated feeling like I was wearing my disease on the outside for all the world to see. And we agreed that we have both completely burned out on people telling us that we could “fight” this thing, that we were “battling” our cancers. “I’m afraid I’ll be disappointing everybody so much if I ‘lose’ and it comes back,” I said. “But we’re all going to die. So what does winning look like? You live forever?” In the meantime, I’ll save my battles for AT&T customer service.

Many of the millions of us who have faced that world-shaking phone call from the doctor, who have had our cells riot into mutiny, who have sat in hospital rooms with children and grandmothers and athletic young men arguing on the phone with their insurance companies, do indeed consider ourselves a pretty feisty lot. There are days during the recovery process where just getting out of bed, just sitting upright, can make one feel like Henry V at Agincourt. And I have a very special admiration for every member of this terrifying club.

But the tired metaphor of battle reduces the experience of cancer to one of agonizing struggle. It makes enemies of our bodies, and suggests that when, as Elizabeth Edwards has, one chooses to end treatment, one has waved a white flag of surrender. I doubt Edwards views it that way. She wrote Monday,

“The days of our lives, for all of us, are numbered. We know that. And, yes, there are certainly times when we aren’t able to muster as much strength and patience as we would like. It’s called being human. I have found that in the simple act of living with hope, and in the daily effort to have a positive impact in the world, the days I do have are made all the more meaningful and precious. And for that I am grateful. “

Elizabeth Edwards has lived a life of pain and loss and betrayal — and through those things she always found the gifts of kindness and happiness. It’s in the hardest experiences in our lives that we frequently find out how much we’re loved, and exactly what we’re made of. They give us moments of unsurpassed joy, and the deepest of appreciation for the spectacular gift of every day. For many of us, life is not a battlefield. It’s a celebration. And with her poise, wisdom, and, to use her own incredibly apt word, resilience, Elizabeth Edwards continues to prove that you don’t have to be a fighter to be every inch a victor.