  We study the p(e,e' pi+)n reaction in the framework of an effective
Lagrangian approach including nucleon, pi and rho meson degrees of freedom and
show the importance of the rho-meson t-pole contribution to sigmaT, the
transverse part of cross section. We test two different field representations
of the rho meson, vector and tensor, and find that the tensor representation of
the rho meson is more reliable in the description of the existing data. In
particular, we show that the rho-meson t-pole contribution, including the
interference with an effective non-local contact term, sufficiently improves
the description of the recent JLab data at invariant mass W less 2.2 GeV and Q2
less 2.5 GeV2/c2. A ``soft'' variant of the strong piNN and rhoNN form factors
is also found to be compatible with these data. On the basis of the successful
description of both the sigmaL and sigmaT parts of the cross section we discuss
the importance of taking into account the sigmaT data when extracting the
charge pion form factor Fpi from sigmaL.
