Well, here’s a development that will provide plenty of blog fodder, as fired CBS News producer Mary Mapes is shopping a tell-all book in which she actually plans to argue the Killian documents are legitimate—whatever that means to Mapes: CBS News Producer Fired In Memogate Will Shop Her Book. (Hat tip: Wes Roth.)

Last Friday, two of the CBS News staffers who’d been asked to resign over a 60 Minutes Wednesday segment about President Bush’s Air National Guard service finally did so, signing nondisclosure agreements in the process. That seemingly brought the network one step closer to concluding its six-month ordeal—just in time for anchor Dan Rather to retire from the CBS Evening News on March 9.

But the end remains out of sight. Executive producer Josh Howard still refuses to resign. And now Mary Mapes, the producer fired for her involvement in the flawed segment, is preparing to shop a book proposal offering an inside account of what happened at CBS News during the memo scandal.

The book will constitute Ms. Mapes’ defense against charges of journalistic misconduct. According to Wesley Neff, president of the literary and lecture agency that is representing Ms. Mapes, the producer plans to argue for the veracity of the four memos supposedly typed by President Bush’s former National Guard squadron commander, Lt. Col. Jerry Killian, in the early 1970’s.

The independent panel that investigated the segment for CBS did not reach a verdict on those memos, which were at the center of the scandal. In its Jan. 10 report, the panel wrote that it could not conclude “with absolute certainty whether the Killian documents are authentic or forgeries.”

Ms. Mapes’ book proposal will include 40 pages of analysis and documentation that she offered to the panel to back up the documents’ authenticity. In an addendum to that material—supplied on the condition it not be directly quoted—Ms. Mapes avoids direct discussion of fonts and character spacing.

Now why isn’t that surprising?