Victoria Smith has left the Pat McCrory campaign.

Smith had been the campaign manager for the Republican gubernatorial candidate in his mayoral race and for the beginning of his first statewide campaign.

In a brief statement, McCrory credited her for "a successful kickoff, several very successful debates" and assembling "an excellent campaign team."

As a result, our campaign is ahead in the polls for the Republican Primary and in a dead heat for the general election in November with campaigns that have been operating for more than a year. A large part of the credit for this success goes to my campaign manager, Victoria Smith. After committing incredible energy to this campaign, she has decided to take a well deserved rest and leave the campaign.

Smith was best known for her insistence at McCrory's kickoff that a hacker had added a misspelling to a campaign press release.

Her resignation was effective this morning.

Gary Pearce says Pat McCrory's campaign staff could sink his campaign.

In a tongue-in-cheek post on Talking About Politics, the Democratic campaign consultant says he fears McCrory's moderate Republican, pro-business record could win in November.

Though he hopes that conservative Republican candidates Fred Smith and Bill Graham could spend millions beating him in the primary, he thinks yesterday's e-mail flap shows McCrory can do enough damage himself.

Never has a campaign staffer done a better job of upstaging the candidate on announcement day.  She managed to make your campaign look both incompetent and dishonest. 

He also asks when McCrory's campaign manager finds the hackers who misspelled governor to let him know.

"It may be the same nefarious villain who puts the typos in my blogs," he writes.

Another twist in the Pat McCrory spelling saga.

Dome just talked to campaign manager Victoria Smith, who said a campaign spokeswoman who said the McCrory campaign misspelled "governor" in a news release e-mailed to reporters this afternoon was wrong.

Smith said again that the campaign was a victim of a hacker who changed "governor" to "governer" in an electronic release announcing McCrory's bid for the Republican gubernatorial nomination.

Smith said spokeswoman Colleen Brannan, who was travelling with McCrory today, has only been working with the campaign to help with today's announcement.

"She only been doing this for six days," Smith said. "She misspoke."

More on the question of whether Charlotte Mayor Pat McCrory knows how to spell "governor:"

The original news release e-mailed to Dome, the one that misspelled "governor," is now fixed.

Dome's technical advisors say the masthead that misspelled the word was embedded in the e-mail, which means the actual image used for the masthead was stored on a server somewhere. The e-mail messages pull the image from the server whenever the message is opened.

McCrory's campaign manager, Victoria Smith, said that no one from the campaign has made any changes and that it must be the hacker who corrected the spelling error.

Smith said that for six months, someone has been hacking and crashing McCrory's mayoral campaign Web site. McCrory was recently re-elected as Charlotte's mayor.

Despite the problems, Smith said no one from the campaign has called law enforcement.

"It is a red flag," she said. "We're going to better secure everything we've got."

Okay all you techies out there, does this make sense? How easy would it be hack this news release?

The Greensboro News-Record asked Charlotte Mayor Pat McCrory's campaign staff if he was planning on running for governor.

The response was a classic non-denial denial, with a wink or maybe a nudge on the side:

"We're not going to be making any comments," said Victoria Smith, his campaign manager. "I really can't comment; just stay tuned."