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Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin

Since most Americans know next to nothing about the woman Sen. John McCain has selected as his vice presidential nominee, we must rely upon the media, her Alaskan colleagues and personal acquaintances who do know her to help us assess Ms. Palin’s suitability for the job she aspires soon to hold.

Some have portrayed her as an unbridled opportunist who will, without warning, turn on anyone at all — even one of her own campaign managers — in order to curry public favor, win votes or to benefit otherwise.

The same seems to be true for any position on any issue she may hold. If she perceives that sentiment is running strongly against her position, she’ll switch it in a Fairbanks minute — and then pretend as if she had been on the right side all along. A certain much-ballyhooed claim on a once-earmarked bridge comes to mind.

Her worldview seems to be one of a lifelong popularity contest — perhaps a holdover from the days of her pageantry, when she was the reigning Miss Wasilla, Alaska in the 1980s.

Yet she seems to reserve her most fierce scorn for anyone who dares to oppose her or any member of her family; she has shown to be quite adept at unleashing a deeply personal vindictive rage upon those poor souls. Just ask the Alaskan state trooper and Palin ex-brother-in-law now famously at the center of a messy state scandal beginning to gather national attention.

By all accounts, Anne Kilkenny falls within the former of those two groups — a Wasilla homemaker and mere acquaintance of Ms. Palin who has never really opposed her on anything, save for the little matter of some library books that then-Mayor Palin apparently had sought to ban from the town library.

So on Aug. 31, two days after Ms. Palin joined the McCain ticket, Ms. Kilkenny decided to send a personal letter more fully informing a select group of her friends what she knew about Ms. Palin’s readiness for higher office.

Ms. Kilkenny asked that the letter be shared only with her friends’ own personal acquaintances and not posted online. But, human nature being what it is, one of those friends nonetheless deemed Ms. Kilkenny’s letter of such grave import that soon it appeared, of all places, on Politico.com — where the masses now are free to judge the letter’s content for themselves and draw their own conclusions.