Rossi may be a bit crazy, but Penon is sane as far as I know. He was in on it. He signed off on these results. So it was fraud on his part.
This is plausible enough that IH has sued Penon. I have no idea how sane Penon is. Rossi was his friend. That alone should have been a disqualification, but this was Planet Rossi, where his friends are the best people on the planet. He might simply have trusted Rossi way too much. I have no idea that he was competent, but, even more, that he actually put two and two together. People sometimes don't. There is no sign in the proposed test procedure that he was aware of the major possible artifacts. And then, to him, it seemed that what he proposed was acceptable. (Did they accept it? Maybe.) Maybe he is lazy. We can speculate all day.
There were possibly certain critical points where deliberate falsification might stand out from naive gullibility. There are possible details that would let us know, and someone who knows those details might know. But, speaking for the rest of us, we don't know.
Hah! One of the lovely recent claims on ecatworld was that I was admitting being part of IH by using "we" as in "what we know." It means us, all of us, but once people believe something, as in are attached to the idea, they may find anything that might look like "proof." It is a great way to make an idiot out of yourself, just convert personal conclusions to facts and interpret the world through the resulting colored glasses.
So the FBI finds some emails to or from Hillary Clinton on Huma Abedin's estranged husband's computer. No indication as to what they contain, none. No claim by the FBI of wrong-doing, just that these were found and were not known before. So ... Donald Trump repeats over and over how she is a criminal, and now there is real proof! Say what? Nothing happened but that a wife's emails were found on her husband's computer, and because of the prior investigation into Clinton's emails, the FBI will want to check these out, to make sure nothing was missed.
I think I remember, once, when my ex-wife and I were going to travel, copying her entire email system to my laptop, so she could access it while we were travelling. Would she remember that? Maybe, maybe not. Maybe we were in a hurry and I never mentioned it. Honi soit qui mal y pense.