CBS and Rather's forged memos

I've been seeing a lot of comments on right-leaning blogs to the effect that "if only CBS had [done some very basic, Journalism-101 check], they would have realized the memos were forgeries (and bad ones at that) and would never have aired the story."

With all respect, I think this is false, and that people who feel it's true are missing a major point: The flaws in the forgeries were so obvious--even to a layman--that CBS had to have known (on some level, at least) what they were dealing with. They ran the story because they want to defeat Bush. At any cost