Anyone who can read the writing on the wall has known from Day One that the presidential election campaign now approaching the 11th hour – fueled by unlimited cash from wealthy partisan ax-grinders and hatemongers on both sides – would be a nasty one.

In that respect, we’re getting exactly what we anticipated, and so the sorry state of affairs in the campaign at the moment can come as no great surprise. The partisan rancor resulting from Florida’s farcical hanging-chad debacle of four years ago practically assured that the next go-around would operate under a different set of rules.

But where is it written in the playbook of this Campaign From Hell that a jaded electorate must also be subjected to the bizarre and the downright weird, especially in respect to events that allegedly occurred 30 years ago? Nasty and cutthroat we’re prepared for. Throw bizarre and weird into the mix, as happened this week, and the entire lashup threatens to go quickly to hell in a handbasket.

Any logical human being who caught the “60 Minutes” program on CBS Wednesday night in which network news anchor Dan Rather appeared to be digging himself deeper into a hole regarding George W. Bush’s long-ago service record with the Texas Air National Guard had to come away with his mind seriously boggled.

Earlier, Rather had aired a story featuring documents purporting to show that Bush had been less than a model fighter pilot while attached to the Alabama Air National Guard during the Vietnam War when his opponent, Democrat John Kerry, was winning battlefield decorations for valor.

The story was old stuff, but the documents were new. Unfortunately, according to a plethora of handwriting and document-analysis experts, they also were bogus, likely cobbled together on a modernday computer whose type font and spacing options were not available on the typewriters of three decades ago. Oops.

Rather came under heavy fire for supposedly being so eager to nail Bush that he allowed CBS to be taken in by a hoax that – especially to an old pro such as himself – should have set off alarm bells in the midst of a down-and-dirty high-stakes presidential campaign. Rather stood by his story, and on Wednesday night’s show he offered up another angle which presumably would buttress his case. That’s when things turned bizarre.

The 86-year-old lady Rather interviewed on camera had served as a secretary to one of Bush’s commanders who allegedly had authored the early-1970s memos critical of Bush. The lady stated that she had not typed the documents in question. She also said she believes the papers – subsequently shown to have been faxed to CBS from a Kinko’s copy shop in Abilene, Texas – to be forgeries. However, she claimed that the sentiments expressed in the documents as to Bush’s performance record accurately reflect those of his superior officers at the time.

Rather seized on that assertion like a drowning man grasping for a tow line, coming across as stubbornly clinging to a conclusion that had an Alice-In-Wonderland quality about it: The documents may be forgeries, but the information contained in them is accurate. Ergo, the original story was justified. One could imagine couch potatoes all across America bolting upright from their stupor, slapping themselves upside the head and exclaiming, “Say what?”

Not surprisingly, such creative logic provoked the shouting heads on the cable television and conservative radio talk shows into a frenzy of bashing CBS and predicting Rather’s demise. And, truth be told, it was difficult to muster much sympathy for either – especially when it became known that the network had been warned by some of its contacts that the documents were of dubious authenticity.

A gaggle of opportunistic Republicans in Congress, knowing a good thing when they see one, immediately called for an investigation – not because they thought such a sideshow would actually come to pass, but because keeping the story alive for another news cycle figured to hurt John Kerry more than President Bush. CBS, aware that its credibility had taken a hit, said it would conduct its own investigation, thank you very much, and Congress should just butt out.

As the clock keeps ticking, putting the country ever closer to the Nov. 2 election, the pity of it all is not that the electorate has again become diverted by a totally irrelevant event that may or may not have happened 30 years ago. The pity is that the faceless genius who masterminded the Machiavellian diversion can’t figure out a way to get the masses as pumped about the real issues in the campaign.

NEWS columnist Kent Ward’s e-mail address is olddawg@bangordailynews.net