Forget Tina Fey.

Sarah Palin is now beyond parody.

Republicans may be struggling to get right with this whole resignation thing. (A new national survey of Republicans by the Rasmussen polling group finds that 40 percent think Palin’s decision to exit stage right will damage her political prospects, while just 24 percent imagines that erratic behavior will help her get elected president.)

Rational Republicans might join the rest of America in asking: Did the woman the Grand Old Party proposed in 2008 to place one heartbeat away from the presidency blink in the face of the challenges of governing?

Did the governor of Alaska wig-out in the middle of her term?

No way, says Palin.

“I am not a quitter. I am a fighter,” Palin told CNN, in one of a series of interviews with national broadcast and cable networks that she gave after announcing that she was, uh, quitting before completing the job to which Alaskans elected her.

But, but, but, uh, you see, that’s O.K. because, er, Palin’s “unconventional.”

“I’m not going to take the comfortable path. I’m going to take the right path for the state,” she said of her decision to hand over responsibility for running the state to someone else.

“That caught people off guard,” the soon-to-be-former governor explained, in what would probably qualify as an understatement. “It’s out of the box and unconventional. That’s what we are as Alaskans and certainly how I am as a public servant.”

The video of Palin’s CNN interview is not to be missed.

And, yes, that really is Sarah Palin — not her “Saturday Night Live” doppelganger.

Tina Fey would do just about anything for a laugh.

But even Fey would not go so overboard as to suggest that Palin would, while done up in fisherman drag, answer a question about her political future by saying: “We can’t predict the next fish run, much less what’s going to happen in 2012.”