Editing: how far is too far?

I've spent a little time going through the photos from Sunday, because people will want copies of the group photos. Unfortunately I'm just an amateur and while I was focused on getting balance in the group itself (not all the tall people on one side, for example) I missed the Aumbry light and Paschal cable behind Fr. Daniel. Well, didn't miss them, exactly (I was distracted by the lit candle, with a flame over Fr. Daniel's head, but gave up on correcting that element before taking the photos. Big mistake. It looked worse in the photos, of course (and I knew it would!).

Altering photos is not really a big thing these days, with digital cameras that can edit out "red-eye" in the camera. But the question is, how much is acceptable?

My history with photo editors has been mixed; Microsoft Photo Editor was nice for quick work but its successor, Photo Manager(?), less so. My old CorelPhoto 7 won't run on Win2K and its successor, Publisher Pro, won't run on my new XP work laptop. Photoshop is too expensive so I'm now using The GIMP, which at least runs on both Windows and Linux and works almost the same on both. It's got a horribly steep learning curve (I had to buy a book, it is so counter-intuitive), but is extremely powerful.

So, I'm looking at this picture. The candle and lamp have been mentioned, but there's a lot of reflection of the flash from glasses (at higher magnifications), and I see some shadows I don't like. I take out the candle and lamp, remove the most bothersome shadow (on the right), re-draw several eyes to take out the flash, and in the worst case take part of a face from another photo (when the flash failed to fire) and paste it here after tweaking the color. How far is too far?