Last Tuesday, I wrote a column about a radio stunt by conservative talk radio host Erich "Mancow" Muller. Until recently, Mancow considered waterboarding a legitimate tool of interrogation. He was so confident that it was the equivalent of having one's face "splashed" with water, he agreed to undergo the procedure on his popular Chicago morning radio show.

As a recreational swimmer, Mancow assumed he would keep his head where others had lost theirs, and that holding his breath would be enough to insulate him from harm. Six seconds of "face splashing" was enough to give Mancow new insight. He told his radio audience that waterboarding was "absolutely torture."

Mancow took a lot of heat from his fellow conservatives for leaving the reservation. He was denounced as a stooge of Keith Olbermann and a morally squishy turncoat in the tradition of Sen. Arlen Specter.

Late last week, Gawker.com, an influential media gossip site, ran a story that took Mancow's "conversion" in an unexpected direction. Under the headline "Did Erich 'Mancow' Muller Fake His Waterboarding for Publicity?" Gawker published several e-mails written by Mancow's publicist indicating that.

When the original person scheduled to do the waterboarding dropped out the day before, publicist Linda Shafran scrambled to find a replacement. She asked several friends to help her find someone who could do it.

The publicist's most incriminating e-mail summarizes why many conservatives believe Mancow engaged in a conspiracy to defame waterboarding: "It is going to have to look 'real' but of course would be simulated with Mancow acting like he is drowning," Ms. Shafran wrote. "It will be a hoax but have to look real."

When Gawker contacted the publicist for a comment, she denied that Mancow's waterboarding was a hoax. "I mistakenly said it would be staged," Ms. Shafran wrote. "That was my mistake and a misunderstanding."

When Gawker published its piece, and a follow-up on Friday, there was enough blood in the water to give his conservative critics a story line more to their liking: "Time for B.S. detector tune-ups, people," right-wing blogger Michelle Malkin wrote. "Next time, libs, don't be so eager to hype a veteran radio entertainer crying 'torture'."

Keith Olbermann had Mancow on "Countdown" last Friday to respond to Gawker's charges, but the twitching radio host didn't do himself any favors by rambling at times and looking like a guy with a guilty conscience. Still, he insisted he really had been waterboarded even though the board wasn't tipped at the right angle and his hands were never bound.

Despite Olbermann's anger at Gawker for casting doubt on Mancow's story, the Web site can't be accused of carrying water for the right wing. The first time Mancow appeared on "Countdown," a Gawker blogger wrote: "We admire Muller for being a man and doing what he did, something his buddy Hannity promised to do a few weeks back but has yet to follow through on. And sadly, we doubt he ever will."

Given Mancow's track record as a prankster, it doesn't seem beyond the realm of possibility that he would pull some weird, ideology-scrambling stunt like this. At the very least, his publicist's answer to Gawker's inquiry indicates that she was willing to stage a hoax if necessary.

It also doesn't help Mancow's credibility that Marine Sgt. Clay South, the man who waterboarded him, admitted that he had never done it before and that he got tips on how to do it from the Internet. Would a sane person entrust his life to an amateur during a waterboarding?

For me, there are simply too many irregularities to reflexively jump to Mancow's defense just because he happens to be telling the truth -- waterboarding is torture. There's a reason why the Spanish Inquisition, the imperial Japanese and our own government resorted to this procedure. It was never seen as benign "face washing" by the trained torturers who put their humanity in escrow to use it.

What's even odder than imagining Mancow's reasons for faking the whole thing (and I'm not necessarily assuming he did) is the sense of vindication expressed by conservatives who have e-mailed me to gloat.

Let's say for the sake of argument that Mancow is a liar. How does that change the fact that waterboarding is torture? Could it be that everyone "knows" that it is torture, but don't care as long as it is used on America's enemies? Am I missing something?