Generally, post-mortem books on presidential campaigns are about as interesting as “How To Do Stand-Up Comedy,” by Vladimir Putin.

But when the dust settles on the 2008 run for the White House, don’t you suspect the behind scenes soap opera of the John McCain campaign could make for some compelling reading. Well, one can only hope.

Nominating conventions, by their very nature, are part pep rally, part re-education camp, part political high mass.

And with the Republicans meeting this week in Minnesota, the tone has also had a feel of “Elmer Gantry” meets “North To Alaska”?

Gracious there’s been more red meat chewed down to the bone here than Hannibal Lecter left unsupervised at Berns’ Steakhouse.

And, of course, there’s been no shortage of bloviating hypocritical foaming at the mouth.

You would have been forgiven Tuesday night if you had found your gin flying across the room in a massive spit-take as former Sen. Fred Thompson, whose own campaign for the presidency was often confused with “My Dinner With Andre,” weighed in with an attack on the Washington insiders who populate the Beltway cocktail party circuit.

After all, Thompson has been a frequent habitue of the very social crowd he was castigating. And from the looks of it, it appeared the senator had never met a buffet line he didn’t like.

But for pure cheekiness, former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who blew through $40 million on the way to winning a one-delegate landslide, took Barack Obama to task for his association with the political machine of Chicago Mayor Richie Daley. No! Really! He did! Honest!

Ahem, a New York glad-hander, himself the patriarch of a massive electoral machinef, was shocked by another candidate’s relationship with a big city political machine? Isn’t this a bit like Hugh Hefner being offended by nudity?

And there was Mitt Romney decrying Big Brother government, after eight years of a Bush Administration, which has treated the Bill of Rights as if it had cooties.

Although it is merely a guess, but you have to expect the books coming out of the McCain campaign will reveal a backstage political drama rivaling “The Best Man.”

In a sense it is a testimony to what hustings pros the likes of Thompson, Giuliani, Romney and Mike Huckabee were to take their marching orders, salute for the good of the party and take to the podium to defend McCain’s patently ridiculous selection of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate.

Surely nobody expected the mandarins of the GOP hierarchy to publicly admit - “Beats me, I have no idea what John was thinking.”

And so these folks and their followers did what any group of seasoned political operatives do when the leader of the ticket decides to shoot himself in the head - smile, praise the decision and blame the media for having the audacity to raise the notion that Palin has about as much business being a heartbeat away from the presidency as Elmer Fudd.

Is was a masterful performance of spin.

Why absolutely John McCain vetted Palin. Of course he knew about her flip-flop on the Bridge To Nowhere. Of course he was aware of the governor’s efforts to fire the state’s safety director because he wouldn’t fire her ex-brother-in-law. Of course he was fully informed Palin, when then a small town mayor tried to fire the city librarian when she refused to remove some books Palin didn’t like from the library. Sure, McCain knew taxes went up in Wasilla during Palin’s mayorship. And absolutely he knew about the unwed pregnancy of Palin’s 17-year-old daughter. Of course, he knew Palin didn’t have a passport until 2007 and had traveled abroad only once in her life.

Yep, yep, yep, no problem.

Can’t wait to read the book now, can’t you?

How else then to defend Palin’s presence on the ticket than to attack her critics as sexist pigs going after a wonderful working mother? Those meanies!

You may have noticed that in many of the interviews with Republican women such as McCain advsor Carli Fiorina and others, Palin was repeatedly described as a “working mother,” to drive home the politically correct message that any criticism of the governor is an anti-feminist assault on women toiling away in the workplace. Balderdash.

We all know working mothers are an intrinsic force in the economy, who successfully balance their jobs and their families. In all likelihood most of us need to look no further than our own spouses.

There are legions of “working mothers” in the private and public sectors who are fine, decent, able, competent executives and office holders.

More to the point, the “working mother” brouhaha is a phony, manufactured GOP convention issue to divert attention away from Palin’s gender neutral political shortcomings as a vice presidential candidate.

At the moment Sarah Palin has been a national public figure less than a week. She has given two speeches. She has held - zero - press conferences. And yet the hard-core right-wing Christian conservative base of the Republican Party is more ga-ga over this empty canvas than a bunch of 14-year-old girls at a Jonas Brothers concert.

This could be a heckuva book, don’t you think.

All we need is a final chapter.