Goliath, meet David.

One Thursday morning, Charles Johnson, editor of the blog Little Green Footballs was scouring the web when he noticed something strange.

It was Sept. 9, 2004 — the presidential campaign between President Bush and Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry was in full swing — and CBS’s “60 Minutes” had aired a piece on the president’s national guard service the night before. The piece was not favorable, portraying Bush’s behavior as insolent and making specific references to attempts by the young lieutenant to finagle his way out of his duties, using his nascent political influence to go over his commander’s head.

As evidence, CBS presented several personal memos from Bush’s commanding officer, Lt. Col. Jerry Killian, which had been leaked to the organization some days prior.

Johnson is an early riser — his workday typically begins at 7 o’clock — but he lives on the West Coast, so by the time he checked the news that morning the blogosphere was already abuzz. Something was not quite right about the memos. The type was off. It didn’t look like something you’d have found in 1973, the date given on top of the memos. In fact, Johnson realized, they looked just like they had been produced on Microsoft Word, a now industry-standard word processing program that didn’t exist at the time.

Johnson then did something monumental both in its simplicity and its impact: He opened up his current edition of Microsoft Word and, using the default settings, typed out the first memo he came across. The results left him flabbergasted. The document he typed matched the one that aired on CBS, from line spacing to letter spacing, from automatically applied superscripts to automatically applied punctuation marks. Even the line breaks Word automatically applies were present in CBS’s memo.

Johnson took a screenshot of his creation, superimposed it over the document provided by CBS News, and posted the image on his blog. The memos, he declared, had been forged. Within minutes, the entire blogosphere was ablaze, and the fire soon spread to the mainstream news media.

When the dust finally settled on what would come to be known as the CBS Rathergate scandal, Johnson and Little Green Footballs clearly emerged the victors. Dan Rather, managing editor and anchor of CBS News, was forced to retire, “60 Minutes” producer Mary Mapes was fired, and several executives within the news organization also withdrew.

Little Green Footballs, meanwhile, received critical acclaim and all the user traffic that comes with it. The episode launched the site into the Technorati 50, a listing of the top 50 most popular blogs, a position from which it has yet to fall.

Still, Johnson says he is unsatisfied. “The media’s reaction to the Rathergate scandal was pretty disgraceful,” he explains. “Instead of investigating who was behind this attempt to skew a presidential election in the midst of a war, they almost universally closed ranks and promoted a trivialized view of what it meant.”

Years ago, Johnson never imagined he would be where he is now. Around the time Lt. Col. Killian was allegedly writing his memos, Johnson was just beginning his career as a jazz guitarist. In the course of his musical endeavors, Johnson has accumulated credits on three gold albums and performed with seven-time Grammy Award-winner Al Jarreau.

As time went on, however, Johnson settled down and began a second career in the growing technology sector. He edited a now-defunct technology magazine and in 2001 he founded a web design firm he named Little Green Footballs. He began the now ubiquitous weblog as an experiment with blogging software, devoting its content to tech-sector news and support.

But that all changed on Sept. 11, 2001. Johnson describes himself as having been politically liberal up to that point. But watching the World Trade Center attacks on television, Johnson explains, was like being “mugged by reality.” Since then, the content and mission of the blog have changed dramatically. “Now,” he says, “the purpose [of the site] is to expose and shed light on the forces and ideologies that led to that attack, and that are still very active in the world.”

It’s a model that hasn’t gone over well with many. The site makes no bones about its suspicion of Islam, leading the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a Muslim civil rights organization, to label it a “vicious, anti-Muslim hate site.” As a product of CAIR’s initiatives, Johnson has been investigated twice by the FBI.

Still, Johnson says, he will continue blogging, and continue to enjoy his work.

He is, after all, no stranger to controversy.