hmm...
it kept truncating the text when I put it in the POST_DEFAULT_BODY, when I put it in POST_BODY all the text just showed up run together (no spaces, ubbcode didn't work, etc.). If I tried to edit the post within the forum it re-truncated.
I posted the content into POST_DEFAULT_BODY once more and then noticed in the forum the apostrophe and hyphen were giving me weird symbols - thinking it may be a character set issue I went to the control panel and changed charset from iso-8859-1 (or something like that) to utf-8
Things seem to be ok now, I can edit the post and all data stays.
I may need to re-import, but at least things are looking better, what do you think about the 'cure'?