Paul campaign: Online impersonator was impersonated [UPDATED]

I posted yesterday that DailyKos appeared to have caught a Rand Paul staffer pretending, in the comments, to be a progressive with doubts about Jack Conway. Paul aide Gary Howard, however, tells me -- and has evidence to back it up -- that this was an even more complicated online game, and that the culprit impersonated the Paul staffer to embarrass Paul's campaign.

The Paul campaign discovered this when the same person appears to have submitted this ludicrous comment through their website's online form:

Your Name Tom Kubica

Email [email protected]

Subject Replacement

Category Social Networking

Message I was discovered and banned at DailyKos. I suggest we immediately pull in all of our covert operatives. I'll need someone to replace me at Daily Kos as well.

The IP address associated with the comment, 38.97.124.170, locates the poster in Framingham, Mass. The real Kubica -- who goes, Howard said, by Thomas, not Tom -- is based in Bowling Green.

"This kid has never been on DailyKos and doesn't know what's going on. He was scared out of his mind that he'd be fired," Howard said.

UPDATE: Or not. Even if that email to Paul's campaign was fake, DailyKos's evidence is pretty strong. They were basing their allegation on the fact that the sign-up email, which has to be validated and can't be faked, is one that appears on Kubica's online resumes.

"Our evidence is based on the signup email -- which can't be scammed. The owner of that email has to verify it by clicking on a link to post on Daily Kos," Markos Moulitsas emails, providing a different, and apparently real, email address for Kubica.

UPDATE: I spoke to Howard about Moulitsas's evidence, which was that the poster had registered and validated the account with the email address [email protected] That email was associated online with Kubica's gmail handle.. Howard said that the cox.net email address is on Paul's mailing list, but they've never seen it used by Kubica. He said he believes Kubica's denial that it's his account, in part because Cox is a regional provider unavailable in Kentucky or in Pennsylvania, where Kubica went ot school, though it is available elsewhere in the country.

He didn't have an explanation for why a "Thomas Kubica" had signed an online petition that carried the same cox.net email.

That leaves the whole thing rather hard to explain away.

"I don’t know if this person is a supporter who went crazy or someone trying to implicate us on purpose," said Howard.

The person who sent the message through the site posted above, meanwhile, seems to be unrelated to the sockpuppetry.

CORRECTION: The cox.net email address is identical to a handle associated with his gmail handle; it's isn't the gmail address; and through Howard, Kubica strenuously denies the comments.