The purveyors of Carbolic Smoke Ball, "proud publishers of fake news since 2005," know our modern world cannot be taken seriously. Now the Pittsburgh-based Web site is discovering that thousands of Americans don't know when someone is kidding.

You know how politicians claim, after every bonehead statement, that they were "taken out of context"? The Smoke Ball decided to have some fun with that notion and published this on June 2:

WASHINGTON -- President Obama said that comments by Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor in a 2004 speech in which she called for the "castration of all white males until they are no longer dominant'' have been "taken out of context" by right wing ideologues.

In the speech delivered to the San Juan chapter of NOW, Sotomayor said, "I want to be perfectly clear about this next comment so that there is no mistaking my words to mean something other than what they plainly say: the time has come to end white male oppression by castrating every white male until they are no longer dominant in Western culture. ..."

White House spokesman Robert Gibbs agreed with President Obama that the statement "has been taken out of context" ...

In the context of a site that is a straight-faced spoof of the news, using the political double-talk so familiar to us all, it's absolutely clear that Carbolic made the whole thing up. It's pure hokum (though I confess it's a brand that has me crossing my legs as I type).

So you can imagine the Smoke Ballers' surprise when their made-up story started getting e-mailed around the country as if it were true.

"Seems to me like Sotomayor is but just one more of the left wing RADICALS that Obama is hoping to place in a key position in OUR government!!!'' began one e-mail before running the Carbolic account in full.

Carbolic is the brainchild of Tim Murray, a mild-mannered attorney who works high in the Gulf Tower (and by that I mean the building is tall, not that Mr. Murray uses stimulants). He co-founded his bull-bursting site with his buddy the banker, Bob Haas, and like Mad magazine, they have others on their cracked staff. They don't use bylines; everyone shares the credit just as an editorial page or the Hell's Angels would.

Mr. Murray knew something was up this week when viewers went up from about 1,000 a day to 9,000, the most the Web site has ever hosted in a 24-hour period. That doesn't count those who are reading the Sotomayor piece elsewhere on the Web.

So many strains of baloney travel the Internet that it sometimes seems like an Oscar Mayer loading dock, and so some sites dedicated themselves strictly to debunking falsehoods. Snopes.com got to the bottom of the viral e-mail that claimed Judge Sotomayor professed zero tolerance of pale male body parts, and found Carbolic, "whose page headers proclaim 'News unencumbered by the facts.' " (It's much like talk radio in that sense.)

Salon, Urbanlegends.about.com and fark.com are among other sites that have debunked the quote. This might be the biggest mix-up since a Carbolic story in 2006 headlined: "Titanic Sank Faster Than Previously Believed; Director James Cameron Ordered To Trim 15 Minutes From His Epic 'Titanic' To Keep It Accurate."

The story later ran on a super-serious "Titanic" forum, unchallenged, at least for a while.

The trick, of course, is to pen prose as straight and dry as a West Texas highway. "Outrageous but with a slight plausibility," Mr. Murray said. He then threw back what I said about his site in 2006: "Ingesting the news is not enough. Twisting the news is a must, a tonic for our battered souls."

In a way, the PG is to blame for all this. In the spring of 2005, Mr. Murray wrote a tongue-in-cheek letter to the editor blasting the newspaper for a "Beetle Bailey" cartoon. He feigned outrage for a panel that "unabashedly flaunted the stark, flesh-tone image of a nude Private Bailey ... the Army hat adorning Beetle only served to crank up the kinkiness factor."

There was much more, but John Allison, our letters editor at the time, wrote Mr. Murray that "the irony is too subtle and too many people will not get your joke." Scott Mervis, editor of our Weekend Magazine, loved the humor, however, ran it there and, sure enough, Mr. Allison's prediction came true. Readers wrote to ask, among other things, "What has Tim Murray been smoking?" Mr. Murray even got hate mail at home.

Thus inspired, he launched Carbolic Smoke Ball (www.carbolicsmokeblog.blogspot.com) two months later.