Atlantic Magazine blogger Andrew Sullivan sent a few emails last week to the McCain camp about Sarah Palin's relationship to Trig, her infant son. The campaign then leaked the emails to Washington Post columnist Howard Kurtz, citing Sullivan's questions as an example of the "insanity that the campaign has had to put up with for the last month."

Here are Sullivan's emails:

"I'm very sorry to say, it's come to this: can you confirm on the record that Trig Palin is Sarah Palin's biological son? . . . Since this is a crazy idea, it should be easy for you or someone to let me know, the most popular one-man political blog site in the world, what the truth is."

"I asked a simple question akin to asking whether you can confirm that the sky is blue. Here's the question in case it got lost: can you confirm on the record that Trig Palin is Sarah Palin's biological son? Can I please get a response of some sort, even if it is that you will not respond?"

The McCain campaign did not respond to Sullivan.

The rumor that Trig is not Sarah Palin's biological child, but her 17-year-old daughter Bristol's, was pervasive in Alaska well before McCain tapped Palin in late August. Propelling the speculation was the fact that Palin didn't look overtly pregnant before she gave birth in April. Then there was the fact that she flew from Texas to Alaska while experiencing contractions and leaking amniotic fluid. Palin and her supporters chalked it up to her being one tough woman, a mother of five, a hunter, a fisher-woman, the governor of the Last Frontier, the hardiest of the bunch. Few Alaskans questioned the governor's sanity at the time, but they quietly wondered: What was she thinking?

A doctor and reader of AlaskaDispatch.com recently emailed us this note: "I believe she was speaking with her MD [before she boarded the plane]; I know who that would have been, and I suspect that she (it's a female doctor in Wasilla) tried to talk Sarah out of traveling, but when she couldn't she probably took the role of counseling her along the way; I believe Sarah had a layover in Seattle."

The Trig rumor was suppose to die when Palin announced earlier this month that Bristol herself was five months pregnant. If this was true, then Trig must be Palin's son, right?

Well, 3,500 miles away, speculation continues to reign in certain Beltway circles and newsrooms. Even Kurtz, a well-respected journalist, has found the adventurous tale of Trig's delivery so perplexing that he had to ask "the question" for himself to Michael Goldfarb, a McCain spokesman: Is Trig really her son?

"These rumors are false. It is her baby," Goldfarb told Kurtz. "The whole thing is absurd. All of this rests on the fact that she wore her pregnancy extremely well. A couple of months later, there are a ton of pictures showing she is obviously pregnant. It's ridiculous. There's just nothing to it. We're not going to release her gynecological records to prove it. It's just madness."

Kurtz questioned where those "ton" of photos could be found.

"I've seen a couple of pictures of her looking extremely pregnant," Goldfarb said. "I don't remember how many I saw."

Even if Palin releases her gynecological records and proves once and for all that she is Trig's biological mother, one question remains: What does it say about the governor's judgment that she willingly boarded an airplane and flew for eight hours over an ocean and wilderness just hours after her water broke? And without warning Alaska Airlines' flight attendants? And with other passengers on board?

Like the origins of Trig, McCain-Palin flacks have also considered this question off-limits. Maybe it's time to ask it now that we know for sure Palin is the mother.