How best to deal with negative influences of fiance's ex.

Several years ago I divorced after 20 years of marriage. My relationship had been very bad for the last few years of the marriage and I was really mentally and emotionally scarred. One day by chance I met a woman who had been a close friend of mine in high school, actually I was her first crush, and it was like we picked up right where we left off. Over a few years since then, she has become my lover and my best friend. I feel like she is the one that saved me from the bottomless pit and gave me life again, and now she is my fiancé. However, here is the problem. We both have kids and both have custody. I have only one still at home, and he is the most well behaved, well mannered teenager you could ever meet. He is not old enough to remember having a real mother in his life, and he has grown to love my fiancé as though he belonged to her. Her kids are younger than mine by a few years each, and when I first met them I hit it off with them fine and was impressed with their intelligence and behavior--UNTIL their father came back into the picture. He was confined in a rehab facility for most of the first year of our relationship. The change in them could be seen immediately after he got out and started to spend time with them again, and since then it has gotten progressively worse. He has encouraged them to be increasingly difficult for their mother to deal with and, since the announcement of our engagement, has used them as tools to sabotage the future of our relationship in every way possible. His power over them is complicated by his family's deeply held religious beliefs, which he uses to paint their mother (and me as well) as a horrible sinner that is not worthy of their love and respect. This is in spite of the years of his own drug and alcohol use and the tons of trouble it has caused for him, his family, and others, not to mention putting her in the situation of being the only responsible parent and ultimately being left with a marginal income and tons of bills. It has come to the point that I am questioning if I can move forward with the relationship because of those kids and the way their father is working through them to take out his bitterness on her. My fiancé needs me and I equally need her, but I have begun to fear the idea of living around her children. I really don't like them anymore, and they very obviously don't like me any more either. I am concerned that I will have to watch my back all the time as they will be spying on me, collecting evidence on me, whatever they can do, to supply their dad with information that could be used to make the situation look different than it actually is. I also don't know how I can deal with their terribly disrespectful behavior since it will be virtually impossible for me to enforce any punishment. I am even afraid that their father may encourage them to make accusations about me or my son that could be permanently damaging. I want to think that they wouldn't do that, but I have already seen the effects of his manipulation and things it has caused them to do against their mother, so I can't totally rule it out. Can I live with the decision to walk away from her knowing how much we both need and love each other? We live a couple of hours apart so to just keeping things exactly like they are is really not an option since both of us have grown tired of dealing with the distance between us. We have considered getting married but living in separate nearby homes. Are there any other workable options that I have not thought of?

I should also mention how the ex's influence on the kids has weighed on her mentally and emotionally. She is slowly becoming a different person too as a result and that concerns me as well.

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