Yes. Given how many electrons we've pushed back and forth about the validity of Obama's BC, the amount of careful high resolution examinations we've made and the hours we've discussing pixel counts, do you think the 20 seconds an overloaded examiner spends on a BC during the Passport issuing process would catch even a moderately good forgery every time?
Yes you need a BC.
A fake/forged/altered one only needs to be good enough to fool a heavily overloaded bureaucrat. If it is fake (and I believe it is) that daily kos forgery is plenty good enough.
Well, this "fake" is new and the guy who did it was pretty talented but it only holds for posting on the internet. The passport examiners won't take copies, electronic images or such. They want original embossed and stamped documents or you get no where.
Moreso, if Obama provided a "fake" BC for his passport.. he could quit worrying about eligibility to be president and instead start worrying about staying out of prison.
Now what is more likely, is that he does have a Hawaii birth certificate but that it has something they don't want out.. so that a passport could be issued without any big issue as the question is just citizenship or not, rather than the question of meeting a Constitutional test, so at the time.. it wasn't an issue.