Hillary Clinton lost her temper the other day. She said she was “sick of the Sanders campaign lying about me.” It’s hard to believe that this is what she’s sick of — since Sanders is, without question, the gentlest opposition candidate any front-runner has faced in the history of American politics.

The truth is likely this: She’s sick, all right — sick of having to run against Sanders.

Look, she had it in the bag, guys, she had it in the bag. Before she declared her candidacy she made like Don Corleone of “The Godfather” and put all the politicians and party bigwigs in her pocket. She lined up the superdelegates. She scared Elizabeth Warren out of the race. She scared Joe Biden out of the race. The only one who dared face her was a septuagenarian leftie lunatic from Vermont.

So what if she lied about her e-mails? So what if the FBI was on her trail? Life was good.

Only now it’s not so good.

The frustration is palpable. Everybody says Sanders can’t win. Everybody says she has the Democratic nomination sewn up. And yet there Bernie is and he won’t go away — and instead of suffering the power outages endemic to socialist regimes, he’s the Energizer Bunny on steroids.

What are these lies about her Hillary is so angry about? The specific claim that set her off didn’t come from the Sanders campaign but from a leftist activist who asked Clinton to defend taking “fossil-fuel” money. She said she didn’t — indeed, it’s illegal for any corporation to donate to a presidential campaign — but then she basically acted as though the activist were an official of the Sanders team spreading falsehoods about her.

The reason the charge makes her angry is that she knows it’s “sticky” — the kind of idea that goes viral. She had faced the same question a few times in previous weeks, all due to an article published by the radical group

Greenpeace detailing $300,000 in donations to Clinton from people who work in the oil and gas industries.

But it’s not “sticky” because it’s about oil and gas. It’s sticky because it resonates with the idea that Clinton is a corporatist in liberal garb secretly plotting to serve the interests of big business and Wall Street against the modest folk. The supposed evils of Wall Street are the focus of the Sanders campaign, and one of the reasons Sanders is bedeviling Clinton’s every step is the ease with which he can tie her to them.

She has only herself to blame in this regard. After all, it was her decision and hers alone to take gigantic speaking fees from investment firms at a time when she knew she was going to be running for president in short order.

A politician with a natural sense of the negative emotions roiling inside her own party would have foregone such gigs. Did she need the money? Please. Her husband made more than $100 million in speaking fees between 2001 and 2013, when she left government. Surely she could have borrowed a couple of bucks from him if she was short before payday.

But she didn’t. She took the dough. And that helps to explain why she sputters with rage when confronted with the leftist-populist accusation she hasn’t been hard enough on corporations like oil-and-gas producers closely tied to the “millionaires and billionaires” Sanders excoriates hourly.

The excoriation is working. Sanders won three of three Democratic contests a week ago, and given the enthusiasm of Wisconsin’s highly organized left wing and polling that shows him with a slight lead, he’s likely to win the crucial Badger State on Tuesday night. That will make four in a row, and a total of 16 victories. Ted Cruz, in second place in the GOP race, has won just nine.

The most dramatic sign of the Bernie surge came on Friday, when we learned that in the first quarter of 2016, the Sanders campaign raised $109 million. That’s January, February and March. To give you a sense of just how mammoth this is, the Hillary Clinton campaign raised $112 million in 2015 — only $3 million more over the course of an entire year.

Before Hillary Clinton declared her candidacy she made like Don Corleone of “The Godfather” and put all the politicians and party bigwigs in her pocket.

No one in the history of American politics has ever raised this much money this fast. Ever.

Now, money isn’t everything, as Jeb Bush’s futile presidential bid has shown us. That’s why increasingly frustrated liberal commentators continue to insist, with greater and greater heat, that the Sanders bid is utterly futile. After the Sanders sweep on March 26, Matthew Yglesias of Vox published a piece called “Bernie Sanders just won landslides in 3 diverse states. He’s still toast.”

Yglesias has a point. For while it is true Sanders has collected 41% of all Democratic votes, it’s also the case that Clinton has received 59%. Math is math, and without a complete Hillary meltdown between now and the June 7 California primary, Sanders cannot overtake her in the race for the delegates meted out from primary and caucus victories.

And without a complete change in the party’s temperature and mood, he won’t be able to get those politicians and party bigwigs who constitute the Democratic superdelegates to climb out of her pocket and into hers.

But you don’t have to be an old Vermont commie hippie to remember Bob Dylan’s lyric that “you don’t need to be a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.” Right now Sanders is generating all the enthusiasm and excitement in the party. That’s what the consecutive victories show. It’s what the money haul shows, and it’s what the mammoth crowds he draws everywhere he goes are showing.

Meanwhile, Hillary is generating all the enthusiasm of the second-weekend audience of a fifth sequel to “Divergent.”

As Sollozzo the Turk, the outsider who decided to challenge Don Corleone, might have put it: “The Godmother is slippin’.”

To be fair, though, it’s likely that many Democrats feel free to vote for Sanders because they think it’s a free vote.

Since they are certain Hillary is going to be the nominee anyway, they can have fun with their ballot. They can offer a hearty salute to the passionate loudmouth who is promising cradle-to-grave free stuff, all of which will be paid for by jailed millionaires and billionaires on Wall Street just before he frog-marches them all right into the prisons he’s going to empty of unfairly incarcerated poor people.

Stranger things have happened than Bernie toppling Hillary at this point. Trump, for example.

If they’re not, though, watch how the Godmother plays the long game. She will be loving and accepting and full of praise and admiration for Sanders and his supporters at her convention coronation. It will be like the meeting of the Five Families, when Vito Corleone agrees to share the political wealth with his fellow Dons.

Then say she wins the presidency — and at that point, the Godmother will settle all family business. It won’t be pretty. My advice to America’s leftist activists would be to avoid all massage tables, lest they meet Moe Greene’s fate. And if Sanders then asks Huma Abedin if she “can help me out, for old times’ sake,” Hillary’s consigliere will answer, “Can’t do it, Bernie.”