In this life one must take the good with the bad. In the case of the DC Metropolitan police that means accepting the downside evidence of manifest incompetence with the boon of great comedic potential.

So for instance earlier this week we heard that Police Chief Charles H. Ramsey had lowered the department's goal for how many homicides it would solve this year to 50.9 percent -- thus turning our nation's capital into a sort of murder empowerment zone, no doubt on the basis of some misunderstanding of a new policy initiative from Kempite Republicans or perhaps DLC Dems.

On the other hand, buried deep in the recesses of the Metro section of today's Post, we find that it has fallen to the U.S. Park Police to help the cops investigate whether the DC police who kept a 24 hour a day guard on the Chandra Levy crime scene for the last few weeks were also responsible for vandalizing the crime scene and carving faces into several nearby (and presumably utterly blameless) trees.