Bombshell news has dropped today in the drama over whether former presidential candidate John Edwards is the father of ex-mistress Rielle Hunter’s baby.

Sources told WRAL News in North Carolina that they expect Edwards, the former senator from that state, to admit he is the dad of Hunter’s 18-month-old child, Frances. The National Enquirer reports that Edwards has secretly undergone a DNA test that proves he’s the dad and that his lawyers are hammering out a child support deal. Edwards has so far rejected the notion that he fathered the child. A federal grand jury is investigating whether his presidential campaign funds were illegally paid to Hunter to keep quiet about the affair, and the Enquirer says Hunter testified against Edwards in the matter.

So what would this do to Elizabeth Edwards, the ex-senator’s cancer-stricken wife who has stood by her man? She has publicly said it’s not her concern whether John is the father or not, and that it won’t affect her own family. But is that possible? In her new book, Resilience, she says John confessed his infidelity in late 2006, before the campaign began. 

Christopher Hitchens writes a piece entitled "The Pain of Elizabeth Edwards" in The Atlantic this week, saying:

Through that hurrah, both Edwardses were living with the knowledge that a third party could at any moment gravely embarrass them. It must have required some unusual nerve for Elizabeth … to go on giving her fighting speeches and fund-raising appeals in between sessions of chemotherapy and acute marital misgiving. She says that she believed the affair to have been a one-off or a one-night stand, but nowhere else in the book or in her public record does she evince the kind of naïveté or credulity that would be required for this to be really what she thought.

Despite all this drama, Elizabeth seems to be keeping busy. She recently opened a unique furniture store called Red Window in downtown Chapel Hill and last month testified before Congress on personal bankruptcies and health-care reform. It will be interesting to see how this ordeal turns out for everyone, to say the least.