Edwards string of lies makes Tiger 'look like an amateur'

John Edwards is certainly not the first pol to get caught in a sex scandal - but his mind-boggling string of lies may leave him looking like one of the most repulsive.

"A lot of pain would have been averted had he done this a long time ago," Joe Trippi, a former senior Edwards adviser, told the Daily News yesterday.

As far as the lengths to which Edwards went to hide his extracurricular activities, "This is about as far out as it gets. As someone else has said, you can't make this stuff up," Trippi said.

"I feel the whole thing's a tragedy and hugely unfair to Elizabeth. She certainly didn't deserve this."

Darrell West of the Brookings Institution called the whole sordid mess "one of the worst cases of candidate deception in recent memory.

"He makes Tiger Woods look like an amateur," West said.

The roller-coaster saga - featuring countless denials of adultery, and another man's claim he had fathered the child of Edwards' paramour - is "obviously a very extreme case," says Robert Feldman, a University of Massachusetts psychology professor and an expert on lying.

"I think this is a situation where one lie leads to another lie, and I think he just dug himself further and further into a hole," Feldman said.

"People adopt whole new identities, [so] I'm not sure this is the most extreme lie ever, but surely this is one that got totally out of control. You'd think at some point he would have wanted to step back and say, 'Enough is enough - I've got to confess.'"

Another former aide who asked that his name not be used told The News he and others still struggle with the scope of Edwards' dishonesty.

"[I'm] past grief, not yet at forgiveness ... maybe approaching some level of understanding," said the aide, who was on a 2008 conference call in which Edwards apologized to staffers for the affair.

"It's been sad to watch. It's been sad to watch the evolving explanations continue to a level of absurdity."

Bonnie Eaker Weil, a psychotherapist and relationship expert, says she suspects Edwards got a thrill from building an emotional pyramid scheme - and getting away with it in the public eye for a good long time.

"Lying is a real high for these people," she said.