It's been interesting to watch the chatter on the Web and in our letters columns on the Collins-Edwards story.

What's the story? Well, as everyone knows, John Edwards, the former U.S. senator from North Carolina and Democratic presidential candidate, admitted having an affair while his wife was being treated for cancer, with a woman who later fathered a child that Edwards denies is his.

Typical political sex scandal stuff. It became a local story for us, however, when U.S. Sen. Susan Collins, a Republican who is running for re-election this year, appeared on a local radio show on Aug. 14 and speculated that Edwards was really the child's father.

As evidenced by today's editorial page, comments and letters continue to pour in on this issue. Many readers either agree with Collins and believe she's merely voicing what most people are thinking. Others use it to contrast her with her Democratic opponent, U.S. Rep. Tom Allen, by criticizing Collins' record in the Senate. Still others think it wasn't news, or wasn't worth running on Page A1.

I won't debate the story's placement on the page. In terms of whether it was news, though, I think readers have spoken very clearly that it was.

This is only one measure, but at last count, the story had received over 111,000 page views at pressherald.com, and people were still commenting on it a week after the story ran. Meanwhile, an online poll picked up another 6,750 votes. One thing that really drove a lot of traffic was having our story picked up by the Drudge report.

Those are huge numbers when you consider that one of last week's biggest stories, Elbert Aull's Aug. 18 piece about Rabbi Moshe Wilansky's prayer battle with Portland City Hall, had 14,316 page views at last count.

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