After 2+ hours of hands-on analysis two days ago, Anca Mosoiu of Tech Liminal in Oakland, CA solved my problem - which was pretty obscure, and while we know where it was, we don't know exactly what it was.
The problem was not in any of the scripts. It was somewhere in one of the MySQL databases. The resolution came when a .gz backup was downloaded to a local PC, unzipped, re-zipped, then uploaded. From that point on, I was able to edit posts, and Google was able to crawl my blog.