Sarah Palin today announced that her 17-year old daughter Bristol is pregnant. She will marry the father.

Word comes from McCain sources that the family announced this in response to rumors that Palin’s son Trig, who has Down’s Syndrome, was actually Bristol’s baby. Those rumors have been effectively quashed by this photo taken in April, just before Trig’s birth.

There are still many questions swirling about Sarah Palin’s decision to board an 8-hour flight from Texas to Alaska AFTER her water broke. She was one month premature with a special-needs child and risked infection and a dangerous airborne delivery by going back to Alaska and not having the baby in Dallas. Anecdotal conversations I’ve had with women show horror at the prospect of getting on an airplane after leaking amniotic fluid late in pregnancy. Who would do that? Isn’t that reckless?

All of this comes on the heels of an ongoing investigation into Sarah Palin’s potential abuse of power for firing the Public Safety Commissioner Walt Monegan for not removing Palin’s ex-brother-in-law from the police force. Mike Wooten, the trooper in question, had been abusing Sarah’s sister and was embroiled in a nasty custody dispute.

Each of these stories in isolation would be noteworthy and a bit odd. But taken together they portray a family in a great deal of crisis – a special-needs infant, a sister and brother-in-law embroiled in a conflict that could result in legal charges filed against Governor Palin for abuse of power, and now a teenage pregnancy, made public apparently to deflect attention paid to the bizarre circumstances of Trig’s birth.

I have no idea what the political ramifications of all this are. I suppose many people will just feel more sympathy for a family that is all too “real.” I know that I feel sympathy for them. But the thought that John McCain knew all of this and decided to promote her from Alaska Governor to a heartbeat away from the Presidency is quite stunning. What does it say about McCain’s judgment? Die he really vet her? Or did he figure that our tabloid-obsessed nation would somehow not care about these things? Or maybe he calculated that these stories would just make her more authentic and sympathetic. Who knows?

All I can say is that this campaign has gotten truly bizarre. Is there any modern precedent for this? GOP officials are supposedly a bit stunned at the Bristol pregnancy. Does this factor in to a “family values” campaign in some way? As a decidedly non-family-values voter I have no idea how to calculate it.