Doubt she's running, but if she does, she has some explaining to do.

Sarah Palin's candidacy for the presidency does not appear to be headed anywhere, but if she does decide to run in 2012, she'll have some more questions to answer about whether she staged a hoax around the birth of her son Trig.

In April, a professor named Brad Scharlott brought this controversy back into the public consciousness with a detailed paper analyzing what has become known as the "baby hoax."

The theory here, as you'll recall, is that for as-yet-undetermined reasons, Sarah Palin pretended to be the birth-mother of her son Trig and staged a highly elaborate hoax involving prosthetic pregnancy bellies, emails, and staged photos. This hoax was so successful, the story goes, that she succeeded in defrauding an entire nation in the process.

Since 2008, when this controversy first reared its head, the mainstream media has been remarkably uninterested in determining the truth about Trig. We suspect that, if Palin does throw her hat in the ring as a candidate, this will change. (Medical records would instantly settle the debate).

But in the meantime, some more photos of Sarah Palin have surfaced that show her looking remarkably not-pregnant three weeks before Trig was supposedly born. These photos were supposedly taken on March 26, 2008, at the Alaska Museum Of Natural History. A tight crop of one of them is above and below (right).

Two weeks after these photos were taken, a week before Trig was born, Palin gave a TV interview at which the photo on the left was taken. Trig birth-hoaxers believe that the massive bump on Palin's belly in the lefthand photo is a fake.

The full photos are online at The Immoral Minority. Something certainly seems to be up with Palin's belly in the photos (it looks as though she's wearing something under there). But she doesn't look 7 months pregnant. And she doesn't look anything close to as pregnant as she supposedly looked two weeks later.

Here's a comparison Professor Brad Scharlott put together: