Interestingly, I recently spoke to a loadmaster who told me that left/right side weight distributions are far less important than forward/aft, to the point that for the majority of aircraft they're loading, imbalance to the left or right side of the plane aren't accounted for at all.
Yes you want the center of mass to be more forward than the center of lift. Otherwise, a small deviation in the pitch becomes hard to impossible to recover -- the system is unstable and stalls extremely easily. If that is a fighter plane of course you want that, so you make sure the opposite is true, and have a computer counteract that during normal flight.
