title: Elegant/proper way to wrap a python module
body: <p>I'm interested in wrapping pep8 so I can monkey-patch it before use. What is the "right" way to wrap a module?</p>
  
  <p>If my module is named pep8 and lives in my path somewhere before the real pep8, any "import pep8" in my module will just import itself. I don't know in advance where the real pep8 will live, since this needs to be generalized for multiple systems. I can't remove the path where my pep8 wrapper lives from sys.path, because that too will be different depending on the system where it's executed.</p>
  
  <p>I don't want to have to rename my pep8, because I'd like for the pep8 command to work without modification.</p>
  
  <p>My pep8 is a directory containing a <code>__init__.py</code> with the following contents:</p>
  
  <pre><code>from pep8 import *
  MAX_LINE_LENGTH = 119 
  </code></pre>