Elizabeth Edwards asks for privacy in her latest ordeal

There were many questions to ask about John Edwards on Friday after he admitted he’d had an affair. But the most poignant ones weren’t really about him.

What, so many people wondered, about his wife, Elizabeth? The woman who experienced both tragedy and success by his side, who campaigned relentlessly for him, and who’s now battling incurable cancer? How was she doing? And if she had indeed forgiven him, should everyone else do the same?

Diane Helbig, for one, was in no mood to forgive.

“I think it’s the meanest thing that could ever have happened to her,” said Helbig, 47, a business development coach from Lakewood, Ohio. “Meaner than getting cancer, which is not controllable.”

Betrayal on top of illness, she said, was like “adding garbage to garbage. I just don’t understand how someone who professes to love somebody can do this.”

Edwards acknowledged Friday that he’d had an affair with a former campaign aide, Rielle Hunter, in 2006 and that he’d lied repeatedly about it.

In her own statement later Friday, his wife answered many questions herself, saying that her husband had made a bad mistake in 2006, that the family had then begun “a long and painful process,” and that she and the rest of the family stood behind Edwards. She made a heartfelt appeal for privacy and decried the “hurtful and absurd lies” wrongly alleging, she said, that her husband had fathered a child outside the marriage.

“Although John believes he should stand alone and take the consequences of his action now, when the door closes behind him, he has his family waiting for him,” her statement said.

That Elizabeth Edwards might have known, and for a long while, didn’t diminish the admiration Ellen Gerstein, a New York marketing director, feels for her.

“You know what – she’s still really bright and I still have a lot of respect for her,” said Gerstein, 40, of Ardsley, N.Y. – though she added that sticking by her husband under those circumstances was “not a choice I would be making.”

A few of those interviewed felt they – and we – shouldn’t be judging the actions of either husband or wife, because their personal life was just that: personal.

“I don’t think it’s anyone else’s business what’s going on in their marriage,” said Joanna Coles, editor in chief of Marie Claire, the women’s magazine. “I feel for Elizabeth Edwards, and I also feel that she’s the only person allowed to make any judgment in this situation.”

If she had forgiven her husband and moved on, Coles added, that also would be her own business – and not, incidentally, an unusual response. “Sometimes affairs make a marriage stronger,” Coles said. “Just because there has been an affair doesn’t mean you don’t have a strong marriage.”