James Lileks, as usual, gets it exactly right:

The whole “fake but accurate” line shows how tone-deaf these people are; it’s like saying a body in a pine box is “dead but lifelike.” It boggles, it really does: the story is true, the evidence is faked, but the evidence reflects the evidence we have not yet presented that proves our conclusion — ergo, we’re telling the truth. They just can’t give it up; they just can’t say the memos were typed by the guy in the “Dude, you’re getting a Dell!” commercial and leave it be, because that that puts the knife in the story regardless of what happened. So they keep going.

They’re not alone. Again, from the Times, a quote from the lawyer re: the fellow who, it seems likely, may have forged the docs, or passed them along.

Asked what role Mr. Burkett had in raising questions about Mr. Bush’s military service, Mr. Van Os said: “If, hypothetically, Bill Burkett or anyone else, any other individual, had prepared or had typed on a word processor as some of the journalists are presuming, without much evidence, if someone in the year 2004 had prepared on a word processor replicas of documents that they believed had existed in 1972 or 1973 - which Bill Burkett has absolutely not done” - then, he continued, “what difference would it make?”

Leave aside “without much evidence,” which is a standard rhetorical trick; you spin a fib about damning evidence en route to making your final point, so your interlocutor argues that last point and appears to concede the parenthetical assertion. Focus on that last line: “What difference would it make?”

On the other side of that question stretches a hall of mirrors a mile wide and ten miles long. Translation: the issue isn’t whether the memos are fake. The issue is what the faked memos prove to be true. You want that to be your standard for accuracy?