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Since President Obama released his birth certificate two weeks ago—and perhaps more significantly, since President Obama announced the killing of Osama Bin Laden—the ranks of America’s birthers have thinned considerably. According to a recent Washington Post poll, just 10 percent of Americans now strongly suspect that the President was not born in the United States; the number of true believers is even smaller.

But 10 percent of the American public nonetheless represents a fairly sizable niche market. So conservative site WorldNetDaily is still dutifully parsing the available evidence—a missing watermark here, a sloppy signature there, broken twigs everywehere—that might cast some doubt on the legitimacy of the birth certificate. Yes, it’s promoting the most obvious explanation: the document is fraudulent. Leading the way is Jerome Corsi, a WND senior reporter and author of the new Obama conspiracy tract, Where is the Birth Certificate? (In light of Obama big reveal, Corsi’s editor, WND editor Joseph Farrah, called the title “unfortunate.”)

Here’s the latest from Corsi:

A private investigator claims employees of the state Department of Health forged three Hawaiian birth certificates for Barack Obama to “screw with birthers.” Takeyuki Irei told WND one document placed the birth at Kapiolani hospital, another at Queens Medical Center and a third in Kenya. The 57-year-old detective, who has been a P.I. since the 1980s, said he was stunned when he discovered that the purported copy of Obama’s original birth certificate released by the White House was more or less an exact image of one of the forgeries… Irei explained the state employee told him the fake records were kept in a vault in Room 303 of the Hawaii Department of Health. The room, next to the director’s office, is well known and holds files such as the records of residents of the Kalaupapa leper colony on the island of Molokai.

Wait a minute—is President Obama a leper?

Anyway, it’s not really worth sorting through this story, but the main takeaway is that the fake birth certificates originally embraced by birthers were actually planted by the Obama crew to undermine the birthers’ investigations—and to set up the context for the release of the real (but still fake) birth certificate put out by the White House late last month. Is your head spinning? Suffice to say, the hard-core birthers aren’t going away anytime soon.