Oh yeah, it’s the silly season all right.

Exhibit A: Allegations roiled the blogosphere and talk radio today that Saddleback Church Pastor Rick Warren gave John McCain a crib sheet for Saturday’s forum.

In truth, he gave both McCain and Barack Obama crib sheets. They weren’t completely unaware what Warren would ask them. In fact, Warren discussed some of the themes he would touch on with both of them and supplied a few of the questions to  them, too.

This should not surprise anyone. Before the forum, Warren said he would not resort to “gotcha” questions. That wasn’t the point of the forum, which turned out to be more like talk show interviews with Warren playing Larry King. In fact, Warren’s questions were sometimes probing and interesting and both men came off far more human than they do when they’re mouthing stump-speech talking points.

If Warren erred, it was in going too far to give off the impression that the two men would be isolated so they could not hear each other’s replies to the same questions. Warren joked that he put McCain in a “cone of silence,” a cute allusion to the “Get Smart” TV show from the ’60s (and the recent movie version). But it was pretty clearly meant to be a joke. In fact, McCain quipped that he tried “to listen through the wall.”

From my vantage point in the media tent, I could tell the candidates had been given some advance notice. In fact, I remember thinking that when Obama acknowledged that he “cheated a little bit” and researched Warren’s proposed emergency-government order to deal with the issue of orphans and concluded it was a great idea.

So what? Didn’t bother me because they both came off so much more genuine than normal. You know what annoys me these days? Trick questions from so-called journalists at moderated debates that only serve to distort the views of the candidates because they’re given 30 seconds to address very complex issues.

But this notion that Warren would try to give McCain a leg up is pure hokum. If Warren were biased don’t you think he would have endorsed the Arizona senator by now?  Think about that. He hasn’t endorsed either candidate. When he says he is friends with both men, I believe him. How else would he have been able to pull this magnificent event together? It’s not like Obama’s champing at the bit to appear with McCain in any of those town hall forums McCain has been begging for. Obama’s no dummy. He knows McCain performs well at town hall forums, and he proved it on Saturday. Where McCain is miserable is when he has to read from a teleprompter, a skill that comes as easily to Obama as Michael Phelps takes to water. McCain’s also a weak debater, and Obama, while not as skilled at that as, say, Ronald Reagan or Hillary Clinton, his ability is formidable. It’s why Obama prefers the three debates with McCain.

The liberals whining about Saddleback sound like Bela Karolyi accusing the Chinese gymnasts of cheating. Yeah, it might be true that McCain could have listened to some of Obama’s interview while driving in to Saddleback, but it’s not like Warren offered up any really tough trick questions and McCain and his advisers did not have a lot of time to prep him anyway. Besides, Obama won the coin toss and chose to go first. (And, for the record, while some of the documentation that purports to show that the Chinese gymnasts were underage appears incriminating, why gripe about it? Just beat them anyway. What’s more satisfying than beating cheaters? Remember the 1980 U.S. hockey team?).

And I still don’t buy this notion that either candidate “won.” Obama scored many good points and so did McCain. I agree with Warren’s take: Both sides probably won supporters. Obama’s were likely younger and McCain’s were older. No surprise there. I also think, in the long run, Obama achieved a great victory in that he tamped down concern among many evangelicals. They may not vote for him, but they won’t feel so panicked about a possible Obama administration. In other words, if they don’t find time to vote on election day then Obama wins. Remember, while many evangelicals don’t agree with Obama’s stance on abortion, many others don’t like McCain’s stance on war (which they also consider a pro-life issue). Some of the Saddleback members I talked to after the forum said they appreciated Obama’s point that while he supports abortion rights, government needs to work harder to reduce unwanted pregnancies. That’s not something they’re accustomed to hearing from Democrats.

Also Monday, the blogosphere erupted with speculation that McCain made up his “cross in the dirt” story. During the forum, McCain told the story about how one of his Vietnamese prison guards made a cross in the dirt on Christmas day once to bond with McCain. I’ve heard the story before, but this time McCain indicated the guard was Christian. This got the conspiracy theorists to suggest he plagiarized the story  from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (who died this month, by the way), an accusation McCain’s camp angrily denies.

I don’t know. Last week, they were saying McCain plagiarized Wikipedia for his speech on Georgia.

Boy, for a guy who admitted earlier this year that he didn’t use computers and left that to his wife he sure is getting good at “the Google.”

So is McCain a really humble guy whose life story just trickles out because he’s so unassuming about his accomplishments as Karl Rove would have us believe? Or is he a calculating politician to be distrusted as John Dean would argue?

The voters, I’m sure, will have the final say.

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