Well, for what it is worth ($0.01), here is my theory:
Who knew about these memos? Only Killian and his secretary, Marian Carr Knox. She claims she has accurate memory of what they contained, contacts someone in the Democrat Party, and then she and a young Democrat operative set out to "reconstruct" the memos. She remembers enough to get a lot of things right, but slips on some details, like the fact of Staudt's retirement 18 months before he was "exerting pressure". The young operative is too young to realize, and Knox is too old to realize, that typing these documents on Microsoft Word is going to be a dead give-away. Then the young operative starts shopping the story around, complete with "documents". Dan Rather thinks he hits paydirt because he believes he got the documents from Killian's secretary, the only person besides Killian who could know about them. That's why he stuck with the story. What I don't know is whether Rather knew the documents were "reconstructed" and went ahead anyway, or just held on to belief in their authenticity because he wanted the story to be true.
As far as the "sweet little old lady" theory goes, I know some 86 year old ladies who are sweet as honey and others who are nasty as vipers. I think we have a viper here, who is mixing fact and hangar gossip and dislike of Bush and an 86 year old's memory from 30 years ago to come up with recollections of memos that are part fact and part fiction.
There probably were a number of politically connected guard members, even some pilots, but probably none were Republicans, much less the son of a Congressman. Sons of Congressmen don't need pull in the military. They are pull. They don't call people "upstairs", people "upstairs" call them. I can see where 43 caused a lot of talk but no sane officer would have expressed anything negative about him, much less put it in writing.
Chair of the RNC, Ambassador to China, Director of the CIA, VP. Improbable that any negative documents would exist in any officer's desk.
OR, she was supposed to come out at a strategic time and vouch for the content of the NG documents after their introduction on CBS. However, they were exposed as fakes very quickly. So now you are seeing a half-assed attempt at salvaging her story. Hence, fake but accurate.
Consider this theory in the context of what was supposed to be a running bombardment of the President going on now that was squelched.
Regards
I think you are correct in that much. However I doubt that she was involved before the fact. If she had been she'd have made sure the documents were properly formated and did not contain any blatent anachronisms. She might indeed have missed that pre-existing retirement, but she'd not have missed the formating nor the use of Army terms rather than Air Force/Air Guard ones. She'd have gotten the signature block correct as well.
The basic story, false of course, has been floating around since W first ran for governor. It didn't require this old lady's help to come up with the outline of the fakes.