…better known as Rielle Hunter, the ditz John Edwards had an affair with. She’s been around.

Rielle Hunter was in a business meeting in the lounge of the Regency Hotel in New York City when she saw Sen. John Edwards across the room. He, too, was in a meeting. They eyed each other. And not just once.

She left the hotel but later in the day found herself walking along Park Avenue toward the Regency. As she approached the hotel, she saw John Edwards on the sidewalk.

Face to face, their connection was instant. They spoke briefly, flirtatiously.

They could have left it at that. But they didn’t.

Instead, they began an affair, according to Pigeon O’Brien, a friend of Hunter who said Hunter told her all about that first meeting. And Hunter fell in love.

“Head over heels,” said O’Brien.

The rest is tabloid history.

When Edwards confessed on national television last month to his affair with Hunter, 44, she was already the focus of the most sensational scandal of the political season.

Edwards’ public denial that he is the father of her 6-month-old baby girl was greeted with skepticism in many corners. So was his timeline.

Edwards said in his televised “Nightline” interview that their affair began after she had been hired in the summer of 2006 to produce the Web videos of an informal Edwards before the announcement of his candidacy at the end of December 2006.

O’Brien contends that the two met no later than February 2006 and started their relationship almost immediately.

Edwards lied? Say it ain’t so.

Let’s rewind the tape of the life that brought Rielle Hunter, nee Lisa Jo Druck, to that fateful meeting on Park Avenue with Sen. John Edwards.

And her name is pronounced “Ree — elle.”

Hunter’s life has been equal parts magical mystery tour and perpetual job quest. She has been a party girl, a minor (but working) actress, a writer of oddly titled compositions, a yoga enthusiast and a spiritual seeker.

During the 1980s and ’90s, she bounced between coasts and made occasional forays in the world abroad, following one guru or another

McInerney — a friend and former boyfriend — immortalized Hunter to a degree by using her as the model for Alison Poole, the hard-partying, promiscuous, glib narrator of his 1988 novel “Story of My Life”:

The first year I was in New York I didn’t do anything but guys and blow. Staying out all night at the Surf Club and Zulu, waking up at five in the afternoon with plugged sinuses… Story of my life.

“She was thrilled,” O’Brien said of Hunter’s reaction to the book.