NOTE: I'll be updating this post throughout the afternoon, so check back frequently.

With the cable-news commentators barking away about whether or not the New York Times should have dropped this morning's McCain bombshell suggesting improper behavior concerning a former lobbyist--and politicos salivating over a New Republic story about internal strife at the paper--it seems like everyone is starting to forget that in the beginning, this wasn't a story about journalism. It was a story about John McCain. So let's step back, take a deep breath and reexamine the facts.

1. Did John McCain have a "romantic relationship"--the Times' words, not mine--with 40-year old former lobbyist Vicki Iseman in 1999-2000?

We have no idea whatsoever. First of all, the story doesn't pretend to prove that an affair was actually going on. Instead, it says that "top advisers" were "convinced the relationship had become romantic" and "intervened to protect the candidate from himself." The distinction is important; we're talking about concerns within a campaign, not anything approaching evidence of a love connection.

Secondly, nowhere in the story do the top advisers themselves actually confirm that they were worried about an affair. Instead, every hint of "romance" comes to us secondhand through "former campaign associates" who "had become disillusioned with the senator." As Marc Ambinder at the Atlantic notes, "associates" is "an umbrella term for friends, family members, aides and the like," but "if the Times really had former paid campaign staffers--aides--making these allegations, it would have attributed them to 'aides.'" Here's a typical sentence: "According to two former McCain associates, some of the senator’s advisers had grown so concerned that the relationship had become romantic that they took steps to intervene."

So it's anonymous "associates" relaying what they say were the suspicions of actual staffers--after those associates had become disillusioned with the campaign. Not the best sourcing. Of course, it doesn't help that McCain, as Matthew Yglesias puts it, "repeatedly cheated on his first wife Carol, of a number of years, with a variety of women, before eventually dumping her for a much-younger heiress whose family fortune was able to help finance his political career." (McCain has admitted that he had affairs.) But despite that backdrop, any report alleging a damaging affair by a current presidential candidate needs to be air tight--especially if it's nearly a decade old. It's clear that the Times hasn't come close to proving that McCain strayed again.

2. So was his relationship with Iseman even a cause for concern? 

Absolutely. Just ask John Weaver. McCain's closest confidant at the time, Weaver has openly admitted to numerous media outlets (including the Times, the Washington Post, Politico and the National Review) that, according to the Post, he "met with Vicki Iseman at the Center Cafe at Union Station and urged her to stay away from McCain"; Iseman confirmed the encounter. According to the Times, the meeting came after she began "turning up with [McCain] at fund-raisers, visiting his offices and accompanying him on a client’s corporate jet."

Weaver elaborated this morning in an interview with the National Review's Byron York:

[Weaver] said he "had no reason to think" that McCain might have been having an affair with Iseman, but he was concerned about word he had heard suggesting that Iseman was telling associates she had connections with McCain... "When you hear back from several people that this person is saying they can get anything done, then that is alarming," Weaver continued. So Weaver met with Iseman, at a Union Station restaurant, and told her to back off. He told me he didn't exactly say, "Get lost," but that that was the gist of it. "The discussion lasted all of five or six minutes in which I told her to cut that stuff out," Weaver told me. "I said, 'You need to stop this.'" Iseman's response, according to Weaver: "She was not happy."

That's not anonymous innuendo; it's hard, cold, on-the-record fact. Combine Weaver's admission with the Times first-hand reporting, which revealed that "a former campaign adviser described being instructed to keep Ms. Iseman away from the senator at public events, while a Senate aide recalled plans to limit Ms. Iseman’s access to his offices," and it's clear that McCain's top brass thought McCain's relationship with Iseman was a problem--whether it was "romantic" or not. (The Washington Post reports that "concern about Iseman's presence around McCain at one point led to her being banned from his Senate office, according to sources close to McCain.") Weaver says the "get lost" meeting was a matter of preserving McCain's political persona. "Our political messaging during that time period centered around... placing the nation’s interests before either personal or special interest,” he told the Times. “Ms. Iseman’s involvement in the campaign, it was felt by us, could undermine that effort.”

But was it only about image? Was the smoke, in this case, unaccompanied by fire? In other words...

3. Did McCain actually do anything wrong?

Depends how you define the word "wrong." If we're talking legally wrong, then no; McCain's hands are clean. But that's not really the issue. Both the Times and the Post report that McCain accepted more than $100,000 in campaign donations from interests represented by Iseman and her firm before taking actions at Isenman's urging that were intended to benefit the lobbyist's clients--and drawing a rare rebuke for interference from the head of the FCC. (McCain denies discussing the issue with Iseman; Iseman says she sent information to his staff.) Here's the Post's account:

In the years that McCain chaired the commerce committee, Iseman lobbied for Lowell W. "Bud" Paxson, the head of what used to be Paxson Communications... In late 1999, McCain wrote two letters to the FCC urging a vote on the sale to Paxson of a Pittsburgh television station. The sale had been highly contentious in Pittsburgh and involved a multipronged lobbying effort among the parties to the deal. At the time he sent the first letter, McCain had flown on Paxson's corporate jet four times to appear at campaign events and had received $20,000 in campaign donations from Paxson and its law firm. The second letter came on Dec. 10, a day after the company's jet ferried him to a Florida fundraiser that was held aboard a yacht in West Palm Beach... When the letters became public, William E. Kennard, chairman of the FCC at the time, denounced them as "highly unusual" coming from McCain, whose committee chairmanship gave him oversight of the agency.

This sort of chronology, which raises suspicions of influence peddling, is par for the course in Washington. But over the past 20 years, McCain has styled himself a crusader for reform, routinely launching stinging critiques of lobbyists and maintaining that he has "never, ever done a favor for any lobbyist or special interest group." Now there's Iseman on one side of the story, "[speaking] up regularly at meetings of telecom lobbyists in Washington" to "extoll... her connections to McCain and his office," according to the Post. On the other side, there's a cabal of worried staffers struggling to separate her from McCain--and, in so doing, tacitly conceding that McCain's connection to this particular woman was stronger and stranger than any of his dozens of other relationships with lobbyists. And in the middle is the senator himself, perhaps betraying the intensity of that connection in a series of "highly unusual" moves that look a whole lot like favors.

Forget the "romantic relationship"; at this point, it remains a huge, hovering question mark. For now, whether you think McCain did anything wrong depends largely on whether you believe he should be held to the standards of "politics as usual"--or whether he should be held to the standards he's set for himself.