I realize that the headline sets a high bar, but this one will be hard to top.

Ronald Reagan became president even though he worked with chimps in B movies.

Arnold Schwarzenegger played a murderous robot, and that didn't keep him from becoming governor.

So can "Law & Order" actor and former Sen. Fred Thompson (R-Tenn.) become the first presidential candidate with this credit? Thompson played a white supremacist, spewing anti-Semitic comments and fondling an autographed copy of "Mein Kampf" on a television drama 19 years ago.

His colleagues say that he was just an actor putting everything he had into playing the role of a charismatic racist, named Knox Pooley, in three episodes of CBS' hit show "Wiseguy" in 1988.

I love this "his colleagues say" construction, because it implies that that's some sort of cover.

I've written before that the features section of newspapers is where laughable opinion pieces that don't make the cut on the editorial page go to get printed. This article purports to be a features piece, but it's outrageously political.

The role is not something Thompson, who is in Orange County for a speech today, has talked a lot about in recent years.

And why the heck would you? It was three episodes of a short-lived TV show nearly 20 years ago!

The article's author, Tina Daunt, obviously didn't get the speech from her father that my dad gave me back in 1977 when, as a five-year-old I went to see "Star Wars." As the evil Darth Vader stepped over the corpses of fallen stormtroopers and rebels, he leaned into me and said: "You know this isn't real, right?"

"I know dad," I replied with annoyance.

Ms. Daunt, Fred Thompson's "Wiseguy" role; you know it's not real.