That's one of the emerging stories in Cliff Schechter's new book, The Real McCain. As Raw Story excerpted, McCain in a heated 1992 public exchange with his wife went beyond his usual expletive-filled rage and allegedly dropped the c-word.

Three reporters from Arizona, on the condition of anonymity, also let me in on another incident involving McCain's intemperateness. In his 1992 Senate bid, McCain was joined on the campaign trail by his wife, Cindy, as well as campaign aide Doug Cole and consultant Wes Gullett. At one point, Cindy playfully twirled McCain's hair and said, "You're getting a little thin up there." McCain's face reddened, and he responded, "At least I don't plaster on the makeup like a trollop, you c**t." McCain's excuse was that it had been a long day. If elected president of the United States, McCain would have many long days.

Given how the beer distribution heiress Cindy Hensley and her $100 million fortune helped bankroll John McCain's political career, one might have expected she would have received more respect. Then again, as McCain's adulterous pursuit of the second Mrs. McCain even while he was still dispensing with the first Mrs. McCain suggests, maybe not.

As Salon detailed back in 2000, the tale of John and Cindy isn't exactly the stuff of supposed Republican family values:

It seems that McCain, who had once revealed to fellow prisoners of war in Vietnam that he wanted to be president, was restless in 1979. As Navy liaison to the Senate, he didn't have the career momentum he had counted on to propel him into an admiralty and on to the White House. He was 42, mired in stifling ordinariness. (Civilians call it "midlife crisis.")

But McCain was making bold career moves on the home front, hotly pursuing a 25-year-old blond from a wealthy Arizona family -- while married. Carol, his wife at the time, had once been quite a babe herself apparently, until a near-fatal car accident (while her husband was in Vietnam) left her 4 inches shorter, overweight and on crutches. The couple had three children, whom Carol cared for alone while her husband was in Vietnamese prisons.

McCain's strategy worked perfectly: After chasing Cindy Hensley around the country for six months, he closed the deal late in the year, had a divorce by February and was married to Hensley shortly thereafter. Bingo! McCain was a candidate for Congress by early 1982, his coffers full, his home in the proper Arizona district purchased.

The story, as Salon rightly concludes, is "compelling - and repellent." And to be sure, today's revelations about McCain's irredeemable language toward his wife, if accurate, are similarly disgusting.

And yet the American people still give John McCain a pass. Even more puzzling is that Mrs. McCain 2.0 seems to have forgiven the unforgivable. Perhaps John McCain used her millions to buy her a precious gift, such as the Bluth family yacht from the TV show, Arrested Development. That, too, was called the "C-Word."