Too Good To Be True? It Usually Is.

And yet, the e-mails came: "Does Sarah Palin really believe that dinosaurs are lizards of the Devil?"

"After you've received a few hundred e-mails like these," says David, "you figure that even if it looks obvious it's not obvious to everyone. . . . There's never anything so ridiculous that at least some people won't believe it."

It's ironic that Snopes is receiving more research requests than ever, says David, because most of what people are looking to verify isn't that hard to find. Although some rumors still require library visits or the combing of city records, many others can be put to bed with a few e-mails or a Googling of an online primary source. (Nothing compared with the three weeks of solid research Barbara says she once spent addressing an e-mail asserting that Bill Clinton had arranged for the deaths of 50 opponents.)

Still, some people, apparently exhausted from trying to sort through anything themselves, completely give up.

"People will forward us the entire text of a New York Times or Washington Post editorial, wanting to know if it's true," says David. "What can you say beyond, 'Well, it's someone's opinion.' "

Or, he says, people will e-mail a document asking, Did someone really write this? Obviously someone wrote it, he wants to tell them. Because you just sent it to me.

"It's kind of flattering and kind of scary," he says. "We never had any intent of becoming political screens -- it just kind of snowballed."

"The only reason we do politics," says Barbara, "is that we get so many political inquiries that it finally becomes easier just to answer them." If they ignored them, she says, those forwards would just keep clogging their inbox, again and again and again.