You may cut and paste as you see fit. As you noted, though, the time may not yet be right.

Since you have some input from eBay already, you could contact the seller and ask that he also get eBay's advice about this difficult situation. The idea would be for him to get assurances from eBay that it would be proper to sell the pair of money clips to you as his listing indicates, and cancel any remaining bids due to an error in the listing that allowed multiple bidders. I think he would feel more comfortable knowing that doing the right thing also would not get him into further trouble with eBay.