In GQ there are three identical threads titled “Cleaning up crime scenes”. I have never seen duplicate threads survive this long and certainly not three threads. 
Stoned hamsters?
Some things can just slip through the cracks … for a while. In this case, we just didn’t notice it the first time around and nobody used the report-this-post-to-a-moderator function. I know it says “This is ONLY to be used to report spam, advertising messages, and problematic (harassment, fighting, or rude) posts”, but that’s just the vBulletin boilerplate. We really don’t mind if you use it to report duplicate threads.
I am nursing a somewhat far-fetched hypothesis about the duplicate threads…
Based on my own experience of missing posts (particularly missing OPs and duplicate posts/threads), I suspect that for some odd reason, the duplicated items are being added in place of the missing ones (sounds really stupid possibly, but stay with me) - what I think is happening (and lest I get a rap across the knuckles from someone who actually knows what they are talking about, let me say again that this is pure speculation, but based on what appears to happen) is that somehow, when you click ‘submit’ and you are unsuccessful, it isn’t that your ‘submit’ didn’t invoke a task on the server, but rather that your task got some wrong (in the sense of unrefreshed) data assigned to it and ended up adding a post/thread somewhere else.
<takes cover against the inevitable>
You may be right. I envision a red-eyed, sneering Evil Uberhamster telling the little guys, “Okay, for the next five minutes, anything that comes in from England goes into the bit bucket, and you use the extra time and space to duplicate anything submitted by somebody from California. They’ll just think it’s a board slowdown period. Bwahahahaha!” 