Custom deb packages?

[debian@xtremedev.com]

I've got a few debian machines here that I'd like to update with a custom
w3m .deb package. Ideally, what I'd like to do is download the source .deb
for w3m, extract it, apply debian specific patches from the package
maintainer, apply my own custom patches to the C source, repackage it up
as a w3m.deb, and install it in my machines. That way I'd still have it
registered in the package management system.

Thus far, I've gotten to:

1. apt-get source w3m

But that's about it. apt-get gave me this listing:

w3m-0.2.4/
w3m_0.2.4-1.diff.gz
w3m_0.2.4-1.dsc
w3m_0.2.4.orig.tar.gz

But then, I don't see the extracted source under w3m-0.2.4/, just debian/
and upstream/, neither of which has a debian-prepatched source which I can
modify before repackaging up. I'm sure this is a common enough occurance
that someone would have figured out an elegant way to do it. No?

I could always just download the w3m sources from it's homepage and build
it and install it by hand, but then it wouldn't get registered in the
debian package management system.

Thanks in advance.