In addition, Rep. Rick Lazio, King's fellow Long Island congressman, and Wall Street financier Theodore Forstmann have said that they would consider running if Giuliani withdraws.

State Senate Majority Leader Joe Bruno, whose comments a day earlier that Giuliani needed to resolve the issues in his marriage seemed to push Giuliani to finally announce his separation plans, said Thursday: "I expect him to stay in the race."

But New York's top Republicans may have reason to worry about Giuliani's ultimately being their Senate candidate. Bruno controls only a slim majority of Republicans in the state. A battered U.S. Senate candidate at the top of the party's ticket in the fall could hurt local legislators running for reelection and cost the Republicans their state Senate majority -- as well as the considerable patronage, contracts and other assorted goodies that go along with it.

As one longtime local political operative explained: "You're a conservative Republican from upstate. You hate Hillary, you hate the Clintons. You say, 'OK, Rudy's from the city, but I'm still going to vote for him.' Then you read about all this stuff and there's a feeling in the pit of your stomach that this is not what you're going to elect, and you're not going to vote for Hillary, so you say, 'Fuck it. I'm not going to vote at all.' And if you don't vote for him, you don't vote for the lesser people on the ticket either.

"For Bruno to have made those comments the other day shows that he's very worried," he added.

In contrast to his performance of a day earlier -- when the mayor was uncharacteristically open about his decaying marriage to Hanover and his close relationship with drug company executive Judith Nathan -- Giuliani pointedly refused Thursday to answer questions raised by Hanover about his relationship with his former press secretary, Cristyne Lategano. For years, the mayor denied rumors that he was having an affair with the much younger Lategano, now 35.

Indeed, on Thursday he appeared to be very much the old, testy Giuliani. "Don't you guys have the slightest bit of decency?" he asked. "Do you realize you embarrass yourself doing this in the eyes of just about everybody?"

Reporters on Thursday attempted several times to ask him whether he had had an affair with Lategano, but he swatted them away each time, offering the explanation that he had already responded to the question in the past.

While the mayor's relationship with Lategano may seem like fodder for the supermarket tabloids, the details present genuine ethics issues for the Giuliani administration. First, Lategano was a city employee, not merely -- as the mayor has referred to his new lady friend -- a "civilian." Second, she received a promotion -- from press secretary to communications director -- and a sizable pay increase, despite near unanimity that she was genuinely awful at what she was being paid to do: respond to questions from the press.

Finally, Lategano was hand-delivered a golden parachute of sorts upon exiting City Hall: She was appointed head of NYC and Co., a private organization that promotes tourism in the city but that receives about 40 percent of its funding from the city. (The previous head of the convention bureau was also a former high-ranking Giuliani administration official foisted upon the group by City Hall.)

But the mayor would have none of it when questioned on Thursday. "I think you're trying to dredge up history that was covered a long, long time ago," he said. "You've all covered this many, many times. You've all asked me about it. I've answered it. And it has no bearing, no relationship, not the slightest bearing or relation, to what's going on right now. I think that what's going on right now has to do with Donna and me. And what you're trying to do is a backdoor way of trying to dredge this all up so you can write more salacious stuff."

While Hanover did not make any more public statements on Thursday, the usual talking heads fear that her accusations about her husband on Wednesday -- "I made a major effort to bring us back together ... He chose another path" -- could injure his candidacy.

"What Donna Hanover's statement did was tell everyone that Rudy is not 'Rudy the Good,'" said Democratic political consultant Henry Sheinkopf, who had predicted Wednesday that Giuliani would be helped by the announcement of his separation -- until his wife's statement later in the day. The "Rudy who said he was going to protect his family was not protecting his family. He was reckless. The person he had made himself out to be was not who he was. The moral messenger was not very moral at all."

The impact of these recent events on the decisions of voters may be overblown. Indeed, there is virtually no history to guide Giuliani or his campaign. But in a tightly contested race with Hillary Rodham Clinton, attacks on Giuliani by his wife could hurt him with crucial swing voters.

"It's going to resonate with suburban women, who are going to walk away from him," said Sheinkopf. "It's going to resonate with upstate voters, who didn't know much about him anyway. They knew that he was Rudy Giuliani, the mayor of New York with an Italian last name who has cancer.

"Now he's Rudy Giuliani, the mayor of New York with an Italian last name who has cancer [and] who cheats on his wife."