Dumb Criminals Make For Comedy Gold

There is nothing funny about a death threat. Nothing, that is, unless it is delivered with flood-tide levels of ineptitude and lunacy.

Former Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court Sandra Day O'Connor has revealed that the members of the Court, as well as several other prominent national officials, received poisoned cookies from a Connecticut woman in 2005. A threat of that kind is serious business. Fortunately, the crack security detail assigned to the Justices acted on a hunch, performing a mass-spectrometer analysis on the baked goods just before the Court consumed them at a pleasant late-afternoon tea ...

Well, no. See, the cookies were accompanied by a note for each Justice. Not a note thanking them for their work on behalf of the nation, with a cookie as a token of appreciation. No, the notes said, "we are going to kill you. This is poisoned."

Somehow, the Justices narrowly avoided misinterpreting this mysteriously ambiguous message by eating the gifts, and had them tested instead. Each cookie apparently was infused with enough rat poison to kill the entire Court.

The mystery deepened when the authorities set out to catch the malicious chef. The notes were cunningly signed in a feigned scrawl with a false name. However, the dedicated sleuths swiftly turned up a vital clue: the letters and envelopes in which the letters were mailed contained the sender's name and address. Typewritten.

Ever the gracious host, Justice O'Connor still referred to the deadly delights as "a wonderful package of home-baked cookies."