A week is a long time in presidential politics, a week in plumbing less so, one might think. But the fusion of the two can have unpredictable results, as seen in the strange case of Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher and his political alter ego, Joe the Plumber.

Since being thrust into the national spotlight as the unwitting star of last week’s presidential debate, Joe has experienced at first hand the ferocities and fickleness of the media glare, portrayed variously as national hero, self-centred semi-criminal and liberal voodoo doll.

Yesterday, he woke to find himself at the centre of a new political storm, this time over his alleged ill-treatment by the Obama campaign. John McCain, for whom Joe has become the ultimate pawn in the electoral endgame of these ebbing days, accused his rival of mounting a witchhunt against the Ohio plumber, a claim Mr Obama angrily rejected on the campaign trail today. Though the game may have changed, Joe looks to remain a political football for some time to come.

But it hasn’t been all bad. Feeling for his plight, a radio show in Oregon started a campaign to “Save Joe the Plumber”, raising the money to pay his back taxes and buy him a plumbing licence. Despite his avowed stance against handouts as “socialism”, Joe so far appears to have welcomed the help.

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Meanwhile a political career could be on the cards. The star of the latest McCain ad in Ohio, he is expected to join the Republican nominee on the campaign trail later this week. A number of Republican groups have even launched an online effort to draft him for Congress in 2010, running against Democratic incumbent Marcy Kaptur in Ohio’s 9th district.

It is all a long way from the day of the final presidential debate, when the thirty-something family man awoke in his suburban Ohio home as plain old Joe Wurzelbacher, plumber, sports fan and otherwise ordinary American. Twelve hours and 26 primetime mentions later he was a household name, propelled to instant national celebrity by two politicians seeking to establish him as a poster child for the average, hard-working American at the heart of their electoral tug-of-war.

Twelve hours after that, Joe the Plumber awoke to a very different world. The media hordes had descended on his front lawn, peering into his life and views with klieg lights and telescopic lenses, while on computers across the nation bloggers tapped feverishly through campaign records, tax documents and state databases in search of any speck of dirt that could explode his newfound iconic status.

At first, Joe the Plumber happily courted the limelight. He gave confident performances on CNN, Fox, ABC and a number of local channels. He respectfully elucidated his views on both candidates but maintained silence on which box he planned to tick come election day, only urging Americans to “find out about the issues for themselves.” He was glad to have done his “duty” in highlighting issues of importance to the nation, he said, and simply took the phone off the hook if the constant ringing bothered him.

Another 24 hours, and the limelight had begun to turn toxic. His name wasn’t really Joe, liberal blogs triumphantly proclaimed, and he wasn’t even a plumber, at least not a fully licensed one. Far from being an undecided voter carefully weighing the issues, Samuel Joe Wurzelbacher was a registered Republican who had voted in the party’s primaries. Most scandalously of all, he owed more than $1,000 to the state of Ohio in unpaid property taxes – hardly the conscientious grafter held up to the nation as an example of how Barack Obama’s tax plan would shatter the American dream.

Even the very claim which elevated him to national prominence was debunked. The plumbing company he planned to buy wasn't making the $250,000 that would see his taxes increase under Mr Obama – in fact it was making roughly half that. Joe himself was earning some $40,000 a year – a sum which would instead make him eligible for substantial tax cuts under the Democratic plan.

Meanwhile cries of “selfish!” began to ring out from low-earners and the socially conscious alike – surely someone making a quarter of a million dollars a year could afford to shell out a few extra bucks to ensure poor kids had healthcare, couldn’t they?

Just as rapidly as he had seen his star rise, Joe watched dolefully as it plummeted back to the suburban Toledo earth. By the weekend, with the media feeding frenzy only growing in intensity, he had had enough. Ever more conspiratorial theories were appearing on the internet – Joe was a plant, some bloggers claimed, possibly even a relative of Mr McCain’s one time cohort Charles Keating (via an identically named son-in-law), with all the sleazy political chumminess that implied. Others, upon discovering that Joe had once lived in Alaska, began to allege connections with Mr McCain’s running mate, Sarah Palin.

"I felt about that small," he complained of the media attention, during an appearance on Mike Huckabee’s Fox News show.

"The media's worried about whether I've paid my taxes, they're worried about any number of silly things that have nothing to do with America," he said.

He couldn’t even get to work with all the journalists camped on his front lawn, he said. "You know, I am a plumber. Just a plumber.”

"When you can't ask a question of your leaders anymore, that gets scary," he added.

But those sacrificed on the political pyre can sometimes become martyrs, and among the conservative-minded workers of small town America, Joe has become just that, whether he wants it or not.

“Plunge the crap out of Washington,” the website, www.joewurzelbacher2010.com, implores visitors. A campaign slogan in the making, perhaps.

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