Last night, as the story of Ashley Todd was first breaking, a picture of the supposedly assaulted McCain volunteer -- in her post-mugging glory -- appeared on the internet.

Immediately I was struck by the backwards "B" on the girl's cheek, as were others. But then I heard that Todd had taken the picture herself and my mind turned to Photo Booth.

Photo Booth is an application for Macs that takes pictures using your laptops built in camera. In messing around with the app on my own Mac I remembered that it would mirror images -- which would explain Todd's backwards lettering.

So I ran a little test:

As you can see, it appears that Photo Booth would have in fact flipped the image. But then the AP reported that the "B" was on the Todd's right cheek, making my scenario impossible. Even in the mirrored Photo Booth, the right cheek couldn't become the left cheek.

And then of course all of my sleuthing became irrelevant when she admitted her whole story was a hoax to begin with.

But I thought it was important for TPM readers to see the real, hard-hitting journalism we're doing everyday here at Talking Points Memo.