An article in Mother Jones co-authored by me and Jason Vest, called "The Lie Factory," is being cited by the Republicans in a race involving Chris Carney, the Democrat, who reportedly served in the forerunner to the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans, called the Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group. Carney, running against Rep. Don Sherwood, is getting fundraising help from Richard Perle.

The odd thing is, the article by Vest and me never mentioned Carney.

Here's the lead, from Eli Lake of the New York Sun, a newspaper partly owned by Perle:

Voters in Pennsylvania's rural, conservative 10th Congressional District received an unlikely mailing earlier this month accusing a former Navy lieutenant of helping start the Iraq war.

Quoting a 2004 article, "Lie Factory," that appeared in Mother Jones magazine and relied on interviews with a former Pentagon analyst turned White House foe, Karen Kwiatkowski, the mailing highlights Christopher Carney's role in a small intelligence analysis shop inside the Pentagon before the Iraq war. The top of the mailing warns voters, "Chris Carney failed our nation once." "Don't give Chris Carney a chance to FAIL us again," the next page says.

The mailing may seem par for the course in an election season in which Republican incumbents are vulnerable to attacks on their support for an unpopular war. But its return address is the Republican Federal Committee of Pennsylvania. The mailing's target is Mr. Carney, who some see as one of the national Democratic Party's brightest hopes to wrest control of the House of Representatives in 2006.

The political dissonance was amplified on October 19 when President Bush stumped for Mr. Carney's rival and the Republican incumbent, Donald Sherwood.Two days earlier, Mr. Carney was in New York for a fund-raiser hosted by one of the president's original foreign policy advisers in 2000, Richard Perle.