John Gibson -- spinning so hard he musses his pompadour

Really, you have to see the video to fully appreciate Gibson's masterful delivery of this "My Word" segment.

On the emoticon scale, Gibson is a notch or two better than Tom Cruise has been lately.

There's the trademarked Gibson half-sneer, an agitated weariness, and the curious occasional flicker of how-did-I-get-damned-to-FOXNews-hell behind his trifocals.

Today's lesson, FOXNewsies, is that Plamegate is bogus because, quick look over there, Sandy Berger is stuffing things in his socks! Why is it that an embarrassing number of partisans and pundits think that the concept of offsetting fouls applies to political scandals? Has that bitching point ever worked?

So let's stick a sock in all the Sandy Berger stuffed his socks nonsense and get right to the morphing.

MORPH #1 -- Karl Rove is not a Bush administration operative outing a covert agent for political advantage, he's merely the helpful, on-call fact-checker for first-tier media.

Karl Rove [simply] explained to a Time magazine reporter it wasn't Dick Cheney who sent Wilson off to Niger, but that it was Wilson's wife.

MORPH#2 -- Joe Wilson, a former Ambassador with a solid resume and reputation, now becomes Joe Wilson, the incompetent and/or lying elitist grandstanding lefty provocateur determined to derail the express train to Iraq.

So Wilson comes back and says no reason to think Saddam wanted to build a nuke bomb out of Nigerian yellow cake — the uranium you need for a bomb.

Evidently, Bush and Cheney didn't believe him. Neither did the Select Committee investigating pre-war intelligence. They said Wilson was wrong and didn't tell the truth — could you say lied — about who sent him to Africa.

MORPH #3 -- Valerie Plame, a CIA agent deeply involved in the agency's WMD proliferation unit, now becomes Wilson's vamping conjugal sidekick and co-conspirator.

But, oh no, sorry Valerie Plame is a CIA agent with covert status. Can't tell the country she was the one who set her husband up to go tank a report on a key question leading up to the war.

But there's more. Not only does Valerie Plame become a vamping conjugal sidekick and co-conspirator, Valerie Plame becomes -- oh my God, she does have blonde hair -- Valerie Plame becomes First Lady Hillary Clinton!

No, no no. She's a spook you see. She only acts like a political hack trying to pull strings on national policy from behind a curtain.

Take my word, this is a "My Word" masterpiece. One for the ages, or at least for the current news cycle.