The New York Times today took after Republican gubernatorial candidate and Tea Party standard bearer Carl Paladino with a lengthy profile that highlights examples of his hard-line business practices and “combative style.”

But the paper does not note his out-of-wedlock child from an extramarital affair, likely a strong issue for conservative Tea Party voters, until nearly the end of the article.

The story begins with this opening:

When his troubled son spent a night in the Erie County lockup on drunken-driving charges, Carl P. Paladino parked outside the jail and slept in his car, just to be close to him.

When he ran out of patience with Buffalo's failing public schools, he bought time on local radio stations to demand the resignation of the superintendent.

“Hello-o-o-o,” his booming voice declared in the ads. “It's time for you to go-o-o-o.”

And when an older man, the lone holdout blocking Mr. Paladino's development of a megastore, refused to sell the house he had lived in for 50 years, Mr. Paladino filed plans to surround the man's home with a sea of asphalt, which officials rejected.

Mr. Paladino, 64, a rumpled, weary-eyed developer from western New York, seemed to emerge from nowhere to capture the Republican nomination for governor, a political unknown who became a vessel for Tea Party-tinged anger against insiders and incumbents.

But for decades he has been an outsize, impulsive and often outrageous figure: polarizing in his politics, relentless in amassing his real estate empire and irrepressible in seeking to impose his will on civic life.

But the affair and the child that resulted from it, do not appear until a few paragraphs from the end:

As his public involvement intensified, he was harboring an agonizing secret in his private life: He had had an affair with a female employee, which resulted in a child named Sarah. He had begun to tell his children, but he could not bring himself to inform his wife. “I adore her,” Mr. Paladino said. “I didn't want to bring that hurt.”

His son Patrick, then 29 and struggling with an addiction to drugs and alcohol, proposed a deal: In exchange for his entering a substance-abuse program, his father would have to tell his wife, Cathy, about Sarah, then 9.

Each man kept his end of the bargain, and Sarah, whom Mr. Paladino supports financially, has been fully incorporated into his family.

When former Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards admitted his affair in 2008 that resulted in an out-of-wedlock child, the Times placed it on Page One. Granted, that involved a former presidential candidate and a situation in which Edwards had been denying the child was his, unlike Paladino. Still, at the time, Times Public Editor Clark Hoyt wrote:

It is a delicate balance to strike for a newspaper like The Times, with a long history of serious purpose and few tabloid instincts.