The virtual photon's plane wave is seemingly created everywhere in space at once, and destroyed all at once. Therefore, the interaction can happen no matter how far the interacting particles are from each other. Quantum field theory is supposed to properly apply special relativity to quantum mechanics. Yet here we have something that, at least at first glance, isn't supposed to be possible in special relativity: the virtual photon can go from one interacting particle to the other faster than light! It turns out, if we sum up all possible momenta, that the amplitude for transmission drops as the virtual particle's final position gets farther and farther outside the light cone, but that's small consolation. This "superluminal" propagation had better not transmit any information if we are to retain the principle of causality.
http://arxiv.org/abs/0712.0347
http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Quantum/virtual_particles.html
If we're talking about total internal reflection and evanescence, then we're talking about a boundary region between two regions with different effective default speeds of light, where lightspeed outside say, a glass block, is being warped, perhaps in vacuo, by the condition that discontinuous changes in the speed of light are forbidden. The transition in signal-transmission velocities is being "smudged out" over a region of space.
The part of that variation that occurs outside the glass would seem to be at least roughly analogous to the variation in lightspeed associated with a gravitational field, so I'm not sure why we would then expect the laws or lightspeed geometry of special relativity to have any validity in this situation. You're taking a theory whose founding geometrical assumptions included a global isotropic speed of light, and applying its results and logic to a situation whose defining characteristic is a variation in lightspeeds.
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