Does The New Republic have a new Stephen Glass on its hands? The magazine’s “Baghdad Diarist” – penned by the pseudonym Scott Thomas, a U.S. solider in Iraq, and which has been published three times – is being called everything from “punctuated with red flags” to “complete garbage” when it comes to the possibility that its first-person accounts are true. And The Weekly Standard is leading the fight for the truth. Or the chance to make the competition look incompetent.

Writes Howie Kurtz:

Some of the anecdotes in the soldier’s July 13 “Baghdad Diarist” column read like perfect little melodramas, although other members of his unit have told New Republic editors that they either witnessed or were told about the episodes. The magazine’s editors recognize that his friends might be covering for him, according to someone with knowledge of the inquiry. Before publication, this person said, editors contacted people who have served in Iraq to ask whether the incidents sounded plausible.

The diarist described how soldiers in a mess hall had openly mocked a woman — he wasn’t sure whether she was a soldier or contractor — whose face was severely scarred from an injury presumably suffered in Iraq: “The disfigured woman slammed her cup down and ran out of the chow hall, her half-finished tray of food nearly falling to the ground.”

Scott Johnson, a lawyer who blogs at Power Line, wrote that such anecdotes sounded “highly improbable,” saying: “How likely is it, for example, that American soldiers would stand for the mockery of a woman disfigured by an IED? Not bloody likely.”

How likely is it that TNR editors, like chief Franklin Foer, want so hard to believe they’ve got an accurate and exclusive take on the war? Bloody likely.