In a Q&A session with readers, Bill Keller, the executive editor at the New York Times, pretty much echoes what I said yesterday about the article on John McCain’s relationship with Vicki Iseman.  The point wasn’t whether or not McCain’s relationship with her ever became romantic.  The point was that for a politician who has made a career preaching against fire, there is a staggering amount of smoke in his own house.

However far the relationship went, there was a tremendous lack of judgment shown by McCain– even by his own admission– regarding the appearance of his interactions with Iseman.  The key passage was, “Mr. McCain acknowledged behaving inappropriately and pledged to keep his distance from Ms. Iseman.”  The point of the article was to ask, what was a self-proclaimed ethics reformer like McCain thinking, skipping around town and in private client-funded jets, getting that cozy with a telecommunications lobbyist, especially one whose clients were contributing large amounts of money to his campaign and were impacted directly by his work in the Senate?

Some key excerpts from Keller’s Q&A:

And, frankly, I was a little surprised by how few readers saw what was, to us, the larger point of the story.

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Perhaps the defining narrative of Senator McCain’s career is his long, determined recovery from scandal. Elected to public office as a national hero, the senator was tainted by revelations that he had done favors for an unsavory banker he considered a friend. It was — as he describes it in his memoirs — a searing humiliation from which he never recovered. He rebuilt his career and his reputation by becoming a champion of clean government, a critic of lobbyists and the vested-interest money that courses through American politics. More than most politicians, he was keenly aware that, as he put it in one of his books, “questions of honor are raised as much by appearances as by reality in politics.”

The point of this “Long Run” installment was that, according to people who know him well, this man who prizes his honor above all things and who appreciates the importance of appearances also has a history of being sometimes careless about the appearance of impropriety, about his reputation. The story cites several examples, and quotes friends and admirers talking of this apparent contradiction in his character. That is why some members of his staff were so alarmed by the appearance of his relationship with Ms. Iseman. And that, it seemed (and still seems) to us, was something our readers would want to know about a man who aspires to be president.

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I hope you’ll take a look at another piece on slate.com, by Jack Shafer, which defends us. “The evidence the paper provides more than adequately establishes that McCain remains a better preacher about ethics, standards, appearances, and special interest conflicts than he is a practitioner, something voters should consider before punching the ballot for him,” is Shafer’s conclusion.