  The relevance of the axial current for pion production processes off the
nucleon with real or virtual photons is revisited. Employing the hypothesis of
a partially conserved axial current (PCAC), it is shown that, when all of the
relevant contributions are taken into account, PCAC does not provide any
additional constraint for threshold production processes that goes beyond the
Goldberger-Treiman relation. In particular, it is shown that pion
electroproduction processes at threshold cannot be used to extract any
information regarding the weak axial form factor. The relationships found in
previous investigations are seen to be an accident of the approximations
usually made in this context.
