Last night, while I was making the rounds of campaign HQs in Columbia, it suddenly hit me that I needed to come in and revamp the editorial page for today, which at that point had gone to the pressroom hours earlier.

The first thing that hit me was that a couple of passages in my column for today were wrong — more about that in a minute. But the thing that would have really hit you in the eye and make you wonder what we’d been smoking was Robert Ariail’s cartoon. What you see above is what would have landed on your doorstep today if I hadn’t gone back in to the office a little before 10 p.m.

When Robert had left for the day, the cartoon was as fine as prognostication could make it. The polls almost uniformly had said, right up until the day of the New Hampshire primary, that Obama and McCain were going to win up there, and that Obama would win by a bigger margin than McCain. All of the talk about Democratic Party insiders was about how Mrs. Clinton would probably have to skip South Carolina, conceding it to Obama, and concentrate on the big states coming up in February.

By 8:30 or so, it was becoming obvious that even if Obama won New Hampshire, it would be close. An hour later, it was looking increasingly like Hillary had achieved an upset win. And this morning, I have yet to find anyone who offers a plausible explanation as to why that happened. People mention the tears, but to me, that remains implausible. I guess I just don’t want to admit voters can be so swayed by something that that. Perhaps I should know better.

Here’s the cartoon I put in place of the Hillary one (it’s also reproduced below) — fortunately, Robert had finished it earlier in the day, only deciding to do the Clinton one late. All I had to do was scan it in and put it on the page.

Due to a glitch in software that automatically searches for each day’s cartoon and puts it on thestate.com, some of you may have already seen the Hillary cartoon. But we’ve fixed that, and at least I was able to keep it out of the paper.

Oh, yes, here are the changes I had to make in my column. Originally, the relevant passage in my column went like this:

    Let’s do Republicans first, since y’all face S.C. voters first (on the 19th) and come back to the Democrats (assuming, of course, that Barack Obama hasn’t sewn up the nomination before this column lands on your doorstep).
    We’d like some specifics beyond the vehement claims that pretty much each and every one of you is “the real conservative” in the race.
    We’ll start with John McCain, the likely winner (as I type this) in New Hampshire Tuesday.

Once again, that was based on the best info available at the time our page needed to go to meet our normal production schedule. Here’s what it changed to:

    Let’s do Republicans first, since y’all face S.C. voters first (on the 19th) and come back to the Democrats (after the cliffhanger night Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton just went through, they could probably do with a rest today).
    We’d like some specifics beyond the vehement claims that pretty much each and every one of you is “the real conservative” in the race.
    We’ll start with John McCain, the big winner in New Hampshire Tuesday.

As the world keeps changing several times a day over the next couple of weeks, this sort of thing is likely to keep happening. I just hope I can always catch it before an error is published.