I can’t take it anymore. I really wanted to let it go, thinking it would pass. But it hasn’t.

I’m sorry. It’s time to put away civility. Attempts to drill down into whatever part of his brain that isn’t syphilitic have failed.

Chris Matthews is the dumbest person on planet earth.

Matthews doesn’t realize that when Mitt Romney joked that no one in Michigan ever asked to see his birth certificate, he was making fun of Donald Trump.

Matthews’ insistence — along with the rest of the media — that Romney’s joke was some kind of racist “dog whistle” about something “ethnic,” intended to make President Obama seem “foreign” and “other,” is an indication that we are no longer having a philosophical disagreement with the left. This has become a question of simple cognitive competence. Is Chris Matthews sane?

I’m not kidding. Anyone who couldn’t see that Mitt Romney was making a joke, and a joke at the expense of Donald Trump at that, should not be editing a middle school website, much less appear as an analyst on television.

But for the sake of helping the mentally challenged, I will attempt to break it down for Chris and the rest of the media. Let’s use a hypothetical example. Imagine that there was a rumor on the far right that President Obama had spent the night in Las Vegas with Jennifer Aniston. It had been totally discredited; C-SPAN even had a tape of Obama giving a speech during the night in question.

Now imagine that, say, Las Vegas mega businessman Steve Wynn kept insisting that President Obama had in fact slept with Jennifer Aniston (please note: this is all made up by me to prove a point). Wynn takes to Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and cable TV to relentlessly, incessantly declare that Barack Hussein Obama had sex with Jennifer Aniston. He goes on “The View.” He brings it up in interviews every chance he gets. He talks about it on Leno. When asked about it, Mitt Romney calls the charge absurd, seeming bemused at the silliness of it.

Now imagine that Romney is giving a stump speech in Las Vegas. He mentions how much he loves the place, the people, the excitement. “And on top of that,” he says, “I’ve never even met Jennifer Aniston.”

Would Romney have just made a joke about President Obama cheating on Michelle, or would he be poking some fun at Steve Wynn?

Mitt Romney doesn’t take birther theories about President Obama seriously. So. He. Made. A joke. About. Them.

If you can’t comprehend that in less than three seconds, apply for a job at MSNBC.

For the past week I’ve sat in front of the TV and computer, dumbfounded as liberals — and not a few conservatives — have found themselves unable to walk the fat, straight line that goes from Romney’s joke to Trump Towers. God on a bicycle, Mitt Romney was playing off of the crazy obsession on the right that Obama wasn’t born in Hawaii.

Referring to a repetitive obsession by denying that you suffer from said obsession is a joke as old as humor itself. I remember being in a comedy club in New York in the early 1980s when a drunk in the audience began to blabber about seeing whales at the New York Aquarium. It was totally off the wall. The comedian tried to continue, but the dude kept yelling out that he was in New York to “see the whales.” He must have said it eight times. Finally the comic looked right at the guy and said, “And that’s entirely enough out of you, sir.” Then the comic said something along the lines of, “Let me tell you what I think about whales,” and everybody laughed.

The comedian wasn’t showing insensitivity to whales. He made a lightly sarcastic quip at the expense of a guy who kept clutching to a single topic.

“There is a thought that stops thought,” G.K. Chesterton once remarked. “That is the only thought that ought to be stopped.” We have gotten to the point where people like Chris Matthews have become so circular in their obsessions with race, gender, and race, that they have lost the basic ability to think. Sometimes I work as a substitute teacher, and I am not exaggerating in the least when I say that it is easier to reason with a marginally intelligent fifth grader than with Christopher John Matthews, who is now officially batshit crazy. He needs help.

We have reached the jumping-off place. Human reason has broken down. Chris Matthews, the progressive Ishmael, will hunt his whales right to the bottom of the ocean.

Mark Judge is the author of A Tremor of Bliss: Sex, Catholicism, and Rock ‘n’ Roll.