This too shall pass.

Just not as quickly as U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham and Co. might like.

At issue is the story about the South Carolina Republican and how he became a deal-maker in the compromise that paved the way for some of President Bush’s conservative judicial nominees to be confirmed.

The controversy lingers. No matter how hard Graham supporters try, the issue won’t die. Letters still are coming in. E-mail messages are still being sent out. And the phone calls have not stopped.

Conservative Republicans remain angry. The fires are being fanned by Christian Right leaders like religious broadcaster Pat Robertson and Focus on the Family president James Dobson. They threaten to recruit opposition for “wishy-washy” Republicans like Graham.

Charleston businessman Thomas Ravenel is considering challenging Graham in 2008. He says South Carolinians thought they were sending a conservative to Congress when they voted for Graham in 2002.

Ravenel, who has deep pockets, came close to making the U.S. Senate runoff last year.

Here’s what S.C. voters are saying about Graham.

“As of today, I will not be supporting the senator for re-election,” says Preston Thomas of Charleston. “He has a lot of explaining to do, and I don’t think this can be fixed. The name Thomas Ravenel sounds pretty good right now.”

State Rep. Robert Leach, R-Greenville, says Graham has dug too deep a hole for himself.

“Greenville residents are mad — and I mean mad — at Lindsey Graham,” Leach says. “And I don’t think it’s going to die down. Personally, I think Lindsey Graham is too much of a Democrat, a liberal, to get out of this.

“I know they are looking for people to run against him. I’ll be one of those who I don’t think will be able to support Lindsey Graham.”

The burst of criticism didn’t catch Graham by surprise, but the volume caused him and his followers to sit up and take notice.

They now are engaged in a bit of damage control, hoping it will stop the bleeding. They are spreading a different story than the one that appeared earlier in the mainstream press.

Graham and Co. are citing a FOX News report that says Graham and U.S. Sen. Mike DeWine of Ohio were dispatched by the White House and Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist to cut the best possible deal.

“No one knows how the vote on the constitutional option (a vote to end the filibuster) would have come out,” DeWine says. “We might have won. We might have lost. If we lost, it would have been devastating for the president when he tried to get a nominee up here for the Supreme Court.”

The White House would neither deny nor confirm the FOX report.

Frist declines to talk about the deal, although he sent Graham an e-mail thanking him for his part in negotiating the compromise.

Hard-line conservatives are not pleased. They feel the votes were there for the majority leader to employ the so-called “nuclear option.”

Graham and the other GOP negotiators “helped snatch defeat from the jaws of victory,” grouses Tony Perkins, head of the Family Research Council in Washington.

He says Graham will pay for it politically.

Graham is who he says he is — his own man. He’s not beholden to any one person or group.

And he’s not apologizing.

“There’ll come a time you’re just going to have to go your own way, and sometimes I do.”