It began with a simple misspelling. It ended three hours later with a candidate for governor having to clean up after a vowel-related damage-control operation went awry.

First, Charlotte Mayor Pat McCrory's campaign sent an e-mailed news release Tuesday afternoon proclaiming in large type that he was running for "governer."

A reporter inquired, prompting a swift and emphatic denial:

"There's no way this was misspelled," said Victoria Smith, McCrory's campaign manager. She said a hacker had accessed the campaign's computer to alter the word. Smith said someone has been hacking McCrory's mayoral Web site for six months, though the campaign had not contacted authorities.

Then, a campaign spokeswoman, who was with McCrory as he announced his candidacy in Jamestown, said there was no hacker after all -- that an overworked graphic designer had simply made a mistake when designing the logo.

That was not the end.

Smith, reached by phone, insisted the spokeswoman was wrong. The errant spelling -- which had been fixed even as the e-mail sat in reporters' computers -- was indeed the work of a hacker. She said the hacker must have re-hacked the campaign to fix the error.

Finally, McCrory himself weighed in. There was no hacker, he told a reporter. The campaign's designer spelled the word wrong.

And so, on a day when McCrory wanted to make a well-orchestrated splash as the fourth candidate to seek the Republican nomination, political types buzzed on the blogs about McCrory, the would-be "governer."

"It strikes me as a rather minor error and a rather minor incident made worse, as usual, by someone simply trying to paper it over rather than saying directly, 'We made a mistake,' " Ferrel Guillory, director of the UNC-Chapel Hill Program on Public Life, said in an interview.

A bipartisan phenomenon

It's not the first time a candidate for governor misspelled the word. In November, the Web page for Lt. Gov. Beverly Perdue, a Democratic candidate, said she was running for "governer." When a reporter pointed out the mistake, the campaign fessed up and fixed the spelling.

The incident Tuesday drew attention to the ability of political campaigns -- and others, for that matter -- to alter e-mails after they have been sent.

As Smith was insisting Tuesday afternoon that a hacker was trying to embarrass the campaign, someone who works for the campaign had caught and corrected the misspelling, even as it sat in e-mail inboxes.

Marketing e-mail messages that display images and pictures often are actually the result of a line of code that tells the computer to fetch an image from a server when the message is opened, said Joe Colopy, CEO of Bronto Software, a Durham-based e-mail marketing company that counts Trek bicycles and John Edwards' presidential campaign -- but not McCrory's campaign -- among its 750 clients. The idea is to allow senders to change or update content after it has been sent, an ability most e-mail users wished they'd had one time or another.

In his speech announcing his campaign, McCrory emphasized that he wasn't going to be running a polished political machine.

"We're going to be like a garage band," McCrory told reporters and supporters. "We're not hiring any high-priced consultants to tell us what to say and how to say it. We're going to speak from the heart."

McCrory repeated the garage band simile when he explained the story of his campaign's spelling saga.

(Staff writer Alex Howard contributed to this report.)