Custom post areas within pages

So its easy enough to setup a page and have your post in that page

<div id="content">
		<?php if (have_posts()) : while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
		<div class="post" id="post-<?php the_ID(); ?>">
			<h2><?php the_title(); ?></h2>
			<?php the_content('<p class="serif">Read the rest of this page &raquo;</p>'); ?>
			<?php wp_link_pages(array('before' => '<p><strong>Pages:</strong> ', 'after' => '</p>', 'next_or_number' => 'number')); ?>
		</div>

But what if you have a page with 2 content columns and a sidebar. Sidebar is easy enough to deal with but the content coloums are not.

<div id="content-left">
		<?php if (have_posts()) : while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
		<div class="post" id="post-<?php the_ID(); ?>">
			<h2><?php the_title(); ?></h2>
			<?php the_content('<p class="serif">Read the rest of this page &raquo;</p>'); ?>
			<?php wp_link_pages(array('before' => '<p><strong>Pages:</strong> ', 'after' => '</p>', 'next_or_number' => 'number')); ?>
		</div>

<div id="content-right">
		<?php if (have_posts()) : while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
		<div class="post" id="post-<?php the_ID(); ?>">
			<h2><?php the_title(); ?></h2>
			<?php the_content('<p class="serif">Read the rest of this page &raquo;</p>'); ?>
			<?php wp_link_pages(array('before' => '<p><strong>Pages:</strong> ', 'after' => '</p>', 'next_or_number' => 'number')); ?>
		</div>

Is there a way, a plugin possibly, so that you can specify numerous posts per page.

Imagining that when you login to wp-admin and go to

pages
edit

you would then get some extra tabs/buttons that say “post1” “post2” for example. Of course you could just put the post for the second coloumn in the actual template itself and make sure you have a custom template for each page you do this with but that would mean you can no longer easily edit the post within wp-admin

Thanks