Today’s St. Louis Post-Dispatch has an “Editor’s Note” on their sports pages about the false quote attributed to radio host Rush Limbaugh, that Limbaugh had supposedly said that slavery “had its merits.” The paper says the quote came from a left-wing book that offered “no specific details” about its origins and that “the Post-Dispatch continues to research the origin of the quote.”

Back on October 7, Post-Dispatch sports writer Bryan Burwell was the first to inject the quote into the debate about whether an investment group including Limbaugh should be able to buy the St. Louis Rams; in his column today, Burwell suggested it didn’t really matter if the quote was a “fabrication.”

So what are we left with? Well, essentially, I think we just threw a deck chair off the Titanic. There is still a huge pile of polarizing, bigoted debris stacked up on the deck of the good ship Limbaugh that he can't deny or even remotely distance himself from.

That doesn’t sound very contrite for a writer who jump-started a nasty round of character assassination with a quote that his own newspaper says needs further “research” to confirm.