You may want to take a seat for this one. As you've surely heard by now, until she was nominated for vice president, Sarah Palin though Africa was a country and not a continent, according to Fox News. But if that sounded fishy to you—in spite of Palin's rather obvious lack of intelligence, it sounded fishy to us—you may have been unsurprised to learn that the source of the rumor was fake pundit Martin Eisenstadt. Or was it? Nobody quite knows.

Gelf asked Fox spokeswomen Irena Briganti (who, as of now, has yet to berate us), who pointed us to this somewhat inconclusive post from TVNewser. To be totally, absolutely, double-sure, we asked Briganti if Fox stands behind the sourcing for story, to which she replied simply, "Yes."

So, to sum this up: Someone in the McCain campaign told Fox's Carl Cameron about Palin's geographic ignorance, off the record. Cameron holds the information until after the election, at which point he is free to divulge it (a practice that, in itself, seems somewhat questionable, though it's quite common). "Martin Eisenstadt" says that he's the source for the rumor on his phony blog, and this hoax is picked up by MSNBC. But he's not the source, he just claimed he was. Get it? Good.

So, who is the source? Our money's on W. Mark Felt.

(Photo of Palin in Kuwait, which isn't in Africa, courtesy asecondhandconjecture's Flickr.)