It's official now!

Via Michael Graham, I see that the terms of the Ra^thergate debate have been formally redefined. Today that venerable guardian of the word "Gate", the Washington Post, presents the case that it's time to lose the forgery debate -- fast -- and get down to the real issue of the memos' underlying truth! First, says the Post, concede the silly forgery:

While Glennon continues to insist that the documents could theoretically have been printed on a Vietnam War-era IBM Selectric, no one has been able to demonstrate this . Leading font developers say the technology simply did not exist 30 years ago.

One telltale sign in the CBS documents is the overlapping character combinations, such as "fr" or "fe," said Joseph M. Newcomer, an adjunct professor with Carnegie Mellon University. Blown-up portions of the CBS documents show that the top of the "f" overlaps the beginning of the next letter, a feat that was not possible even on the most sophisticated typewriters available in 1972. Newcomer calls the documents "a modern forgery."

Tests run by Thomas Phinney, fonts program manager for Adobe Systems, show that none of the possible font widths available on any typewriter or any IBM device from 1972 are able to produce an exact replica of the CBS documents. "Can they do something 'similar'? Sure," Phinney said. "Could they produce those exact memos? Impossible."

As conservative critics called for Rather's scalp, the spotlight turned to who provided the documents to CBS and whether that person was part of a hoax, or even a political setup.

CBS sources confirmed a report in Newsweek that one of the people Mapes interviewed was Bill Burkett, a retired Guard officer who has accused Bush aides of conspiring with the head of the Texas Guard to "sanitize" the president's military records. Burkett's accusations, which have been denied by the White House and Guard officials, have never been proved.

Since leaving the Guard, Burkett has run a ranch near Abilene, Tex., and been active in local Democratic politics, posting messages on the Internet urging other Democrats to wage "war" against Republican "dirty tricks." He has told reporters that he suffered from depression and had a nervous breakdown after the military declined to treat him for a tropical disease he contracted while on assignment in Panama.

CBS executives declined to address news accounts that pinpoint Burkett as the confidential source for the documents but say they weighed the fact that anyone turning over the material would not be a fan of the president. Burkett would not comment on whether he supplied the documents but said by e-mail to The Post that he would "encourage everyone to not cast too many doubts prematurely" on the "60 Minutes" broadcast.

Strong, the former Guard officer, said last week that when Rather showed him the documents, they contained a header showing they had been faxed to the network from a Kinko's copy shop in Abilene.

As the storm of criticism grew louder, Rather, Heyward and the program's staff still believed that the documents were genuine. They had no way of knowing that an 86-year-old woman in southwest Houston was discussing the controversy with a neighbor.

"I know Dan Rather is right," Marian Carr Knox, a former secretary in Bush's Guard unit, recalled saying. The neighbor said she should do something about it. So she called a Houston newspaper, Knox told CBS, but did not get a call back. Dallas Morning News reporter Pete Slover soon tracked down Knox and showed her copies of the Killian memos.

"These are not real," declared Knox, who said she handled Killian's memos. "They're not what I typed, and I would have typed them for him."

When a "60 Minutes" staffer showed Howard an online version of the Morning News story Tuesday night, "my initial reaction was not, 'Oh, my God, we're wrong,' " he said. But he immediately recognized that his program had to take her account seriously.

CBS got hold of Knox and had her on a plane to New York on Wednesday. Rather started the hour-long interview at 4 p.m., and while Knox said the underlying story was true -- that Killian had made such comments about Lt. Bush -- she insisted the memos were fake. Mapes had three hours to edit the interview for that night's "60 Minutes."

As they continue their investigation into whether they were hoaxed, CBS officials have begun shifting their public focus from the memos themselves to their underlying allegations about the president. Rather said that if the memos were indeed faked, "I'd like to break that story." But whatever the verdict on the memos, he said, critics "can't deny the story."

As the days begin to blur for Josh Howard, he embraces the same logic: "So much of this debate has focused on the documents, and no one has really challenged the story. It's been frustrating to us to see all this reduced to a debate over little 'th's."

In our obsessive compulsive mania to elevate form over substance, we just couldn't see the forest for the trees, could we?

We all owe the Old Media an apology!

UPDATE: Not so fast! There are still a few staunch suporters of the documents who know how to write, and who deserve a pat on the back for their loyalty and stamina:

It's pretty funny, really, how right-wing bloggers are serially breaking their arms patting themselves on the back for having exposed "Forgerygate." Actually, all they've really managed to prove is P.T. Barnum's famous adage, perhaps recast as "There's a blogger born every minute."

But I wonder..... Might that make me a pseudo fascist? (Gee, I was just getting used to being a pseudo libertarian.....)