When your comrade gullibly falls into the trap of engaging in a peripheral firefight, one which is being deliberately fanned by the enemy to weaken its opposition, which ultimately helps everybody on our side lose the war.
That's what everybody's trying to say. They're not claiming that BHO's US birth is legitimate (nobody knows that), but that it is a dangerous distraction clearly being exploited by this administration's strategists to make all of BHO's opposition look petty & absurd & our falling into the trap of even addressing it at all right now undercuts the credibility - and the power - of our opposition to all the truly scary stuff this man is doing right now.