If you believe his enemies, Mike Wooten is not the kind of state trooper you would like to meet on a snowy highway in Alaska. Among the allegations against him are: he used a Taser on his ten-year-old stepson; he shot a moose without a licence; he drank beer in his squad car. Not to forget the claim that he once made a death threat against a retired school teacher.

None of this would be of much interest to anyone outside America’s 49th state if not for three facts: until recently Mr Wooten was the brother-in-law of Sarah Palin, the Governor of Alaska and now the Republican nominee for vice-president of the US; the retired school teacher was Chuck Heath, Mrs Palin’s father; and some say that the Alaska Governor used her power inappropriately in an attempt to get Mr Wooten fired.

Welcome to Troopergate, the latest scandal to befall Mrs Palin, until two years ago the mayor of a small town in Alaska with 6,700 people, and now running for the second-highest office in the nation.

Mrs Palin, 44, a moose-hunting, salmon-fishing former beauty queen, can barely afford more controversy. On Monday, a mere three days after her appointment as John McCain’s running-mate was announced, she revealed that her 17-year-old daughter was pregnant and would marry the father. The revelation dominated the TV news, while “Palin” and “pregnant” became two of the most searched-for terms on Google.

Now, with an official report by Alaska’s state legislature pending into Mrs Palin’s handling of the Wooten case, fears are heightening within the Republican Party’s election machine that Troopergate could prove more damaging. Worse, the publication of the report could become an “October surprise” — political shorthand for the PR disasters that occasionally torpedo presidential campaigns in the month before the polls open.

Mrs Palin has said that she welcomes the investigation, but has been unsettled enough to strengthen her legal representation in the case, which focuses on the claim that she fired Alaska’s public safety commissioner, Walt Monegan, after he refused to dismiss Mr Wooten from the state police force — a powerful organisation in Alaska because of the state’s lack of big metropolitan areas.

Mr Monegan has said that Mrs Palin never told him directly to fire the trooper, but that he felt pressure to do so from various members of her administration.

Many of the most provocative statements related to Troopergate are already on the record, including an e-mail that Mrs Palin sent to the chief of Alaska's state police in 2005, after she allegedly witnessed the death threat against her father.

"Wootens words were, 'I will kill him. He'll eat a (expletive) lead bullet, I'll shoot him?'," wrote the then-Mayor of Wasilla.

Politically, it remains unclear how voters will react to Troopergate in the polls. Republicans appear to be banking that Americans will not find Mr Wooten a sympathetic character. During the death threat investigation the trooper claimed that he had used a Taser against his stepson in "a training capacity" after the child said that he did not want to look like "a mama's boy" in front of his cousin

The cousin in question was none other than Bristol Palin, the Alaska Governor's pregnant daughter.

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