A guy wrote a satirical column recently for the National Review Online on how he'd been blown off by the Washington Post. Trouble is, it never happened.

An excerpt:

I" desperately want to appear in The Washington Post," Bruce Stockler wrote last week in National Review Online.

Now he has -- although not in the way he intended.

The public relations man produced a funny column on all the opinion pieces he has submitted to The Post without success -- or, as the headline put it, "one writer's suffering at the hands of a major newspaper." But Stockler said yesterday he is "quite embarrassed to admit" that he didn't submit any of them.

What about those impersonal "thank you for your submission" letters he said the paper kept sending him? After first saying he had to check, Stockler acknowledged: "I guess I lied about the fact that I got a cursory rejection letter when in fact I got nothing. Humorists are liars."

"This piece seems to me to be pretty obvious satire," said National Review Editor Rich Lowry. "It seems to me he's obviously making stuff up to be funny . . . not necessarily right at the top, but by the end." The second paragraph of the piece says "here are the facts"; only in the last half-dozen paragraphs does Stockler openly fantasize about disruptions to his phone and television service and an ice cream truck with Texas plates circling his block. "If a couple of things are deliberately outrageous, that signals the reader it's not serious journalism," Lowry said.

Stockler did not contend that he had produced a transparent satire. He said he merely bent some facts to suit his narrative, and that he really has tried repeatedly to get published on The Post's op-ed page -- just not in the way he wrote.