The DNC is spinning wickedly, trying to minimize the effects of the CBS Killian memo scandal and relegate it to the nasty, but not too serious, realm of “dirty tricks”—who cares who did it, can’t we just move on?

But since the earliest days of the scandal I’ve been writing that the seriousness of this issue cannot be exaggerated. Someone, somewhere, sat down with a copy of Microsoft Word and set out to deliberately influence one of the most important elections in US history with fraudulent documents. The implications of this are huge, even if the DNC is not connected in some way.

This is why I’ve been so determined to keep the issue in the forefront. It’s not about Dan Rather, ultimately. It’s about the collusion of news media with the farthest of the far left, the new fascists who are so sure of their ideological purity that they give themselves permission to lie, cheat, steal, forge … whatever it takes to advance their holy cause. CBS News has become so corrupted by this “true believer” mentality that their employees drive CBS News vans with anti-Bush slogans openly displayed in their front windows—at the height of the Rathergate scandal.

William Safire gets it right in today’s op-ed for the New York Times: First, Find the Forger.

WASHINGTON — At the root of what is today treated as an embarrassing blunder by duped CBS journalists may turn out to be a felony by its faithless sources.

Some person or persons conceived a scheme to create a series of false Texas Air National Guard documents and append a photocopied signature to one of them. The perpetrator then helped cause the fraudulent file to be transmitted by means of television communication to millions of voters for the purpose of influencing a federal election.

That was no mere “dirty trick”; it could be a violation of the U.S. criminal code. If the artifice had not been revealed by sharp-eyed bloggers, a national election could have been swung by a blatant falsehood. …

Conservatives should stop slavering over Dan Rather’s scalp, and liberals should stop pretending that noble ends justify fake-evidence means. Both should focus on the lesson of the early 70’s: from third-rate burglaries to fourth-rate forgeries, nobody gets away with trying to corrupt American elections.