PC World’s Dan Tynan looks at the Top 10 Internet Scandals of All Time, and number 3 features your humble lizardoid master.

3. Dan Rather Bids a Font Farewell

They were supposed to be the smoking gun the Bush Administration was desperate to conceal: four documents, dating from the early 1970s, that allegedly proved that powerful friends of our current president pulled strings to keep him out of Vietnam and put him into the National Guard. But shortly after 60 Minutes host Dan Rather revealed the documents’ existence in September 2004, the gun blew up in his face. Conservative blogs Free Republic, Little Green Footballs, and Power Line questioned the authenticity of the documents—specifically, whether a 1970s-era typewriter could produce the superscript th and curly apostrophes found in the four memos. [Excuse me, but there was a hell of a lot more than that wrong with these obvious fakes. See below. —ed.]

Instead of focusing on where W actually was when he was supposed to be serving with the National Guard in 1972, political bloggers immersed themselves in the arcana of typewriter fonts—and the mainstream media followed suit. Twelve days after airing the segment, Dan Rather publicly apologized for the story, saying he could not vouch for the documents’ authenticity. A few months later, he quietly left CBS—with the inevitable “gate” permanently appended to his name.

Although it’s nice to be recognized as one of the whistleblowers on this event, I can’t help noticing a faint whiff of “fake but accurate” in this description. Tynan seems to be saying we missed the real story, that we should have been investigating where George W. Bush really was (he was in the Texas Air National Guard, as had already been exhaustively documented by that time), instead of obsessing over these hard-to-understand minor typographical details.

This attitude matches a constant mainstream media theme of obfuscating and downplaying the seriousness of what really took place in the Rathergate scandal: a still-unsolved attempt to use phony military documents to tilt a US presidential election in the middle of a war. It was an attempted fraud that would have had historic consequences if it had succeeded.

And you really don’t need to be versed in the nerdy “arcana” of typewriter fonts to make a judgment on this one. All you need are two functioning eyes and at least two functioning synapses: