Republican presidential hopeful Sen. John McCain has found himself well and truly pwned, after setting up the now obligatory candidate page on MySpace.

Unfortunately McCain got a rather lazy assistant to make page, and they just pinched a designer’s template, without crediting him. Worse, they kept using the designer’s original image files, direct from his server, breaking the unwritten law that you ‘never mess with another man’s bandwidth’.

++unfortunately for McCain, the designer he unwittingly ripped off was Mike Davidson, CEO of the rather popular news aggregator Newsvine.com. Davidson thought that if he was being tricked into serving up images, he might as well serve something funny, so he changed the picture file to a ‘signed’ statement from McCain that he had reversed his hardline stand on gay marriage, and come out in favour, “particularly marriage between passionate females”.

He then wrote up the story on Newsvine, and unsurprisingly it got out far, wide, and quickly. In the 13 hours before McCain’s team twigged and pulled the plug on the image, it was on TechCrunch & Slashdot, all round the world and even made it onto telly.

McCain isn’t out of the woods yet, as he now has a very messed up MySpace page with no template, and a sneaky commenter has pulled the same trick on him again by posting positive images and switching the remotely hosted files after moderation.

A very cautionary tale to any of our own politicians trying to tick the yoof box on the cheap with half-hearted dabbling in social networking.