Huma Abedin (right) spoke during her husband's news conference Tuesday. Scenes from a marriage

New York City Mayoral candidate Anthony Weiner unleashed his typical torrent of verbiage on Tuesday — but words couldn’t compete with the excruciating image of his embarrassed wife squirming in the spotlight both have sought.

In the most cringe-worthy moment of a four-month political comeback yarn that has tested Gotham’s gag reflex, Huma Abedin, the dignified wife of a serially disgraced Democrat, nervously defended her husband at a Tuesday press conference.


Her effort came amid new disclosures Weiner had shared an online relationship, and anatomical snapshots, with yet another female admirer.

( WATCH: Huma Abedin stands by her husband)

If the presence of Abedin, an elegant longtime aide to Hillary Clinton, was intended to buttress the former congressman’s decision to remain in the race, it graphically illustrated the personal toll his quest is taking on his family and represented the gravest threat yet to Weiner’s fragile repentance-and-redemption narrative.

His luck may be running out. The tragi-slapstick spectacle of Weiner and his wife appearing at the gritty offices of the Gay Men’s Health Crisis Center in Manhattan to save his career clearly marked a new, and dangerous, phase for Weiner.

“You want this guy to be mayor? Or you want him in therapy?” asked an incredulous Doug Muzzio, a Baruch College professor and longtime observer of city scandal, from Koch-era corruption to Rudy Giuliani’s well-chronicled infidelities.

( PHOTOS: Huma Abedin in the public eye)

“I mean, this is a guy who’s got some severe psychological problems. … It’s noble that she’s stuck with him. I feel sorry for her. But she’s complicit too, an enabler or whatever you want to call it. … It’s the Twilight Zone. It’s Oz. It’s f—-ng crazy.”

If Abedin was complicit, she also appeared deeply pained. She struggled to find a comfortable standing position as her husband soldiered through his statement, smiling uncomfortably to reporters she had met as Clinton’s body woman, at times physically drifting away from Weiner, as if she wanted to somehow slip quietly out of the camera frame, stage left.

No such luck. When it was time for her to speak, she unfolded a single sheet of white bond, apologized for her nervousness and remarked how her marriage survived only after “ a lot of therapy.”

( WATCH: Weiner 'cubicle guy' a viral hit)

Only a few hours earlier, a website called “The Dirty” posted revelations her husband had used the online handle “Carlos Danger” to share a picture of his penis with a young woman who admired his health care reform “rants.”

Weiner has long suggested that more pictures and texts would pop out of the ether, but on Tuesday he admitted a damning new detail: That he had been carrying on an e-affair until last November — after resigning his House seat, apologizing to his wife and becoming a national punchline.

Weiner, who has held his own in recent polls against a Democratic field that includes City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, former City Comptroller Bill Thompson and Public Advocate Bill de Blasio, seemed to be befuddled by his own behavior.

( Also on POLITICO: Weiner kept sexting after resignation)

“Perhaps I’m surprised more things haven’t come out sooner. This behavior that I did was problematic to say the least and destructive to say the most,” he said. “I’m sure many of my opponents would like me to drop out of the race.”

That they did.

DeBlasio, the liberal Democrat who stands to gain the most from Weiner’s departure, was first out of the gate.

“Enough is enough,’’ Mr. de Blasio told reporters. “I’m calling on Anthony to withdraw from this race, for the good of the city that I know he loves as much as all of us.”

Supermarket magnate John Catsimatidis, who is running against Joe Lhota for the Republican line, agreed.

“The Mayor of New York City should be a leader that all the residents of our city, especially our children, can look up to,” he said in a statement. “Anthony Weiner should do what is right for his family and our city and drop out of the race for mayor so we can end this soap opera.”

Current City Comptroller John C. Liu, a Queens Democrat and mayoral candidate who is lagging in the polls, didn’t quite call for Weiner to drop out, but tweaked his rival in a statement sent to reporters. “The issue of Anthony’s relationships, online or otherwise, is between he and his wife, however the propensity for pornographic selfies is a valid issue for voters,” he said. “Ideas and eloquence can propel candidates, but judgment and character still do count.”

But Weiner, a tenacious retail campaigner known more for street politicking than policy chops, vowed to stick it out and reiterated a theme he’s struck since April, when The New York Times Magazine devoted 8,000 words to the proposition that the former congressman and MSNBC mainstay had cleaned himself up enough to govern a city of 8 million souls.

His wife, who divides her days between assisting the campaign and managing the former secretary of state’s post-government affairs, agreed to serve as his on-camera validator.

“When we faced this publicly two years ago, it was the beginning of a time in our marriage that was very difficult,” Abedin said, voice barely above a whisper. “And it took us a very long time to get through it. Our marriage, like many others, has had its ups and its downs.”

She added, “It was not an easy choice in any way” — although it was unclear whether she was referring to her decision to stay with him or his decision to rejoin the political fray.

“We discussed all of this before Anthony decided to run for mayor, so really what I want to say is: I love him, I have forgiven him, I believe in him, and as we have said from the beginning, we are moving forward.”

The question now, of course, is whether New York shares that opinion.

“That awful puff piece in the Times magazine resurrected him, and then the conventional wisdom is ‘how can he survive this?’ but he keeps surviving,” says Mickey Carroll, a veteran New York reporter turned pollster.

“My own view is that Wiener can’t get elected mayor, but the numbers don’t say that,” added Carroll, who wondered, along with the rest of the city’s pundit class, whether Tuesday would sidetrack the wisecracking Brooklynite’s comeback.