Not only is the controversy over the $14,000 payment made to John Edwards’s former mistress still rearing its ugly head, but there is more information to suggest perhaps his affair lasted longer than he’s admitting.

An associate of Edwards, speaking on condition of anonymity, told the Associated Press that the April 2007 payment from the then-presidential candidate’s political action committee (PAC) to Rielle Hunter — after she stopped working for it — was made in exchange for 100 hours of unused videotape she shot producing short Web movies for which she already had been paid $100,000. Hunter’s firm was paid as contracted for, the associate said.

The explanation is the first to justify the payment, which came months before Edwards’s chief fundraiser quietly began sending money himself to the pregnant woman. Hunter has since had the baby but has refused a paternity test to determine who the father is. Edwards emphatically denies he’s the baby’s daddy.

Edwards also has denied any knowledge of those payments to Hunter from his national-finance chairman and wealthy Dallas-based trial attorney Fred Baron. Baron also has described his payments to Hunter as a private transaction.

But the cash came from Edwards’ OneAmerica PAC, whose expenditures are governed by U.S. election laws. Using PAC money for personal use is a federal criminal violation.

Adding fuel to Edwards’ infidelity scandal, The New York Times reports today on a web of connections between several lawyers and Edwards that suggest they were part of an orchestrated effort to protect him that continues to this day.

The lawyers in question — who represented Hunter and Edwards campaign aide Andrew Young, who claims he’s actually the baby’s father — are linked through Baron, Edwards national finance chairman, who paid Hunter that $14,000. After scouring public records and interviews with people close to Edwards and Hunter, the Times found that Edwards’s PAC went to unusual lengths to make that final $14,000 payment to Hunter’s film company months after its contract ran out.

The Times’s findings also suggest it’s possible the affair went on longer than Edwards admitted and that the effort to conceal it by Edwards’ inner circle was much more extensive than has been reported.

The AP also suggests that, noting that Edwards and Hunter spent months traveling together in 2006, as he prepared for his second failed White House run. One of Hunter’s friends, Pigeon O’Brien, said that Hunter’s affair with "John from North Carolina," who was married to a woman who had been seriously ill, began in March 2006. That contradicts Edwards’s statement the affairs started only after he hired her to produce several videos for his website, the first payment for which came in July of that year.

O’Brien told the Times that Hunter had a hard time dealing with the fact that "John" was married.

"There were stormy moments for her, a lot of tears and a lot of struggle," O’Brien said.