Now that a connection has been established between Bill Burkett, the CBS source in the forged documents story, and Kerry advisors Joe Lockhart and Max Cleland, the Democrat National Committee has gone into a furious, and some would say desperate, "spin" mode.

DNC Chair Terry McAuliffe has even issued a statement all but accusing the Republicans of forging the anti-Bush memos themselves:

“In today’s New York Post, Roger Stone, who became associated with political ‘dirty tricks’ while working for Nixon, refused to deny that he was the source the CBS documents. Will ...the White House admit today what they know about Mr. Stone’s relationship with these forged documents? Will they unequivocally rule out Mr. Stone’s involvement? Or for that matter, others with a known history of dirty tricks, such as Karl Rove or Ralph Reed?”

McAuliffe's statement is both illogical and counterproductive.

It's illogical because, to believe that Republicans forged the documents, you need to believe that the G.O.P. would forge documents attacking their candidate, leak them to the Democrats and/or CBS News, wait for CBS to air them and assume, hope and/or pray that some blogger, "sitting in his living room in his pajamas", would make history by convincing the world that CBS News aired forged documents.
You need to believe that the G.O.P. would count on these bloggers getting other "mainstream" news sources to pick up on the story and help discredit the Democrats and CBS.
And, finally, you need to believe that these Republican operatives, these calculating geniuses, were willing to bet that these pajama-clad cyber warriors would accomplish all this before the documents did irreparable damage to President Bush.

In addition to being based on such a wildly improbable scenario, this latest statement by the Democrats is, to say the least, counter-productive.

Normally, when a damaging story surfaces in an election, the best way to deal with it, especially once denials are impossible, is to change the topic and/or let the story die down ("move on," some might say).

However, by accusing the Republicans of attacking their own candidate in order to "frame" the Democrats, McAuliffe just opened up a whole new reason to keep talking about this story. This is bad for the Democrats for several reasons, not the least of which being that it distracts from other issues. It also creates a scenario under which the casual observer might begin associating the story, and the forging of the documents, not with CBS (which has apologized and would, presumably, like to "move on"), but with the Kerry campaign itself.

Given the above, it is difficult to fathom why McAuliffe would make this wild and unbelievable attack in the first place...

...unless, like O.J. Simpson, he has no choice but to hope we believe him when he says he's searching for the "real" culprits.