I should be really happy tonight...

...but to tell you the truth, I'm totally knackered.

The euphoria I felt after Jorge, Eduardo and the rest of the traitorous pro-illegal amnesty-loving lime in Washington got their butts whupped vanished quickly.

Thank you, work.

It's like this: I completed a long article last night. Getting it done required considerable research, to put it mildly. So much incorrect information has been published about the subject in the past that I was having to make my way through a minefield of misinformation.

This morning, I was giving it the usual one-last-read before sending it off, when I noticed a detail that didn't seem right. Source A said one thing, source B said another. I checked back through some documents I received through a friend that I knew had to be accurate.

Oh, shit.

Without going into grim detail, Source A has a financial reason for getting his version of this particular sliver of history into print. He told me he had studied various original documentation, from which he had put together the facts.

I never saw the material that he used to draw his conclusions; my friend sent me documents from the same place that contradicted much of A's version of events.

So, after spending several hours on the phone with various people who had puzzle-piece insights, I sat down with the story to see how I could rewrite it so I wouldn't get caught peddling b.s.

I'm almost done now, 12 hours later.

And I'm torn between laughing at the lunacy of the whole thing and being enraged by the way I was played. Wasting a whole extra day on this doesn't thrill me either.

If I told you the story, you'd wonder why the hell anyone would care about such trivia. Without having direct involvement as the writer, I sure wouldn't care. Let's just say that it could make a six-figure difference in source A's bank account when he decides to cash in if I corroborated his version of events in print.

All I care about is not being a chump. Well, that, and avoiding the torture of reading letters to the editor that start: "Where did that idiot writer get the idea that...?"

Jesus. Why can't I just win the damn lottery and hang this crap up?

Gotta go back and finish now....