A follow-up to Ed’s post last night about the Enquirer’s allegation of an affair, which metastasized via our privacy-defendin’ progressive superiors into the charge that the smoking gun lay buried in the divorce papers of Todd Palin’s former business partner, Scott Richter. Why else, after all, would Richter seek an emergency order to seal those records?

Answer: Because he’s tired of him and his kid being harassed by press vultures and nutroots cranks.

The liberal blogosphere was abuzz Friday with news that a friend of Sarah and Todd Palin had tried to seal his divorce records…

[A] stream of journalists and couriers from NBC, the Los Angeles Times, Court TV and other outlets (including this reporter, presently serving as Politico’s Alaska bureau) [made] their way to the Palmer courthouse to photocopy, at 25 cents a page, the 75 or so pages in the Richters’ marriage dissolution file.

Hence, Scott Richter’s motion this week to seal the file, in which he wrote, “I am friends an [sic] landowners in a remote cabin property with [the Palins] and as her campaign moves forward, my phone #’s and addresses are being used thru this file to obtain unwanted contact daily. My cabin life and private life is extremely important to me and my young son, who find ourselves and our lives disrupted by such contact.”…

Those who couldn’t make it to the Palmer courthouse in person were out of luck for much of Friday, since the court’s website crashed from all the traffic directed to it by a link on Andrew Sullivan’s blog.

I mentioned this on Tuesday but it’s worth repeating: As much as we’d all like to believe it’s dKos holding the hoops through which these morons jump, I’m convinced it’s Sullivan whom they’re taking their cues from. Yes, most of the media is liberal, and yes, many of them read Kos and don’t read right-wing blogs where they’d have access to debunkery; Ace has been writing about that all week and it’s true as far as it goes. But I don’t buy that they’re so cocooned that they’re unaware Kos has a credibility problem. It’s Sullivan, with his TNR pedigree and his reputation — to this day — for being “right-leaning” and therefore, ahem, impartial who lends credibility to the rumors by stamping them with the Atlantic’s imprimatur. Surely a serious pundit wouldn’t post smears about Trig Palin being Bristol Palin’s child. There simply must be something to it.

Meanwhile, per the Politico piece, the Anchorage Daily News is getting calls from the media about whether Palin cheated her way to victory in the 1984 Miss Wasilla Pageant. Yes, really.

Update: If the Enquirer story is true, the one virtue of it will be watching people on both sides reverse themselves instantaneously on the relevance of adultery to political credibility.