The morning President Obama was awarded his peace prize, I wrote this:

The news could just as easily be a Saturday Night Live comedy skit or a Mad Magazine layout. If it had appeared in either one of those venues yesterday, it would have seemed a ripe subject for satire and humor. I daresay even many liberals would have laughed at the notion of Obama getting the Nobel for peace.

And up popped his record of accomplishment, reassuringly blank.

Oh, no, wait. That wasn't the real President Barack Obama. That was a comedian playing President Obama on "Saturday Night Live." And, for impressionable types who find it hard to tell the difference, CNN - in a broadcast first that should surely have its own category at the Emmys - performed an in-depth "reality check" of the SNL sketch. That's right: They fact-checked the jokes. Seriously. "How much truth is behind all the laughs? Stand by for our reality check," promised Wolf Blitzer, introducing his in-depth report with all the plonking earnestness so cherished by those hapless Americans stuck at Gate 73 for four hours with nothing to watch but the CNN airport channel. Given the network's ever more exhaustive absence of viewers among the non-flight-delayed demographic, perhaps Wolf could make it a regular series:

Who was that lady I saw you with last night?

That was no lady, that was my wife.

"In fact, our sources confirm, his wife is, biologically speaking, a lady. Joining us now is our Medical Correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta. Sanjay, we all like a joke, but how much truth is behind the laughs?"