A man, a mess of microphones, and a swinging-from-the-heels miss.

“The mayor is my brother. I love him and he’ll speak for himself.’’

When?

“Rob is telling me these stories are untrue, that these accusations are ridiculous, and I believe him.’’

Legions don’t.

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“I will always support my brother as the mayor of this city because I believe in his track record.’’

Immaterial.

Thank you, Doug Ford, for the irrelevancies, the dissonance and the staggering example of how not to manage damage control.

If advisers and spin doctors had anything to do with that thing at city hall, they should be shot.

Six days to block out a response, send it up the flagpole, try it on for size, and this is what Toronto got — a Ford once-removed: a whole lot of self-aggrandizement, deflective posturing, media bashing and whining.

Surely even the Ford Truthers — those who see conspiracies everywhere, who pummel both facts and allegations into a gerrymandered version of events they can swallow without gagging — were taken aback by the spectacle the mayor’s brother made of himself on Wednesday.

The long stall was transformed into sputtering farce.

We are now in DEFCON 2, people, one stage away from annihilation for the Ford regime — which, at the moment, has been reduced to a hard-core cadre of about half a dozen political allies and one (1) lackey local newspaper.

You know what? It’s over.

Doesn’t even matter anymore if the videotape of Rob Ford apparently smoking a crack pipe is authentic. His countering performance in the past week — Run Rob Run — has been so wobbly, so moot, so mute, that it’s impossible to imagine any salvaging of reputation or integrity.

When CTV’s Austin Delaney buttonholed Hizzoner at a Tim Hortons Wednesday morning, the mayor had the cheek to joke about the Ford Watch, ribbing the reporter about journalists with sleeping bags dogging his movements. “You want me to make your bed for you tonight?’’

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That might help explain why Ford’s handlers have clearly told him to put a sock in it — the talking sock that is Doug. Just about every time the mayor opens his pie-hole, un-scripted, he’s historically made matters worse.

But the time for a lawyer-crafted cone of silence has passed, because the story isn’t fading away. It grows ever-more shrill in this city and on mocking U.S. talk shows, where Ford has become a piñata target, the donkey’s-tail face of Toronto. And Doug as Rob stand-in is a stunt double catastrophe.

The peek-a-boo mayor has missed every opportunity to get in front of the story, as any image specialist will tell you. He could not possibly have played it any more badly. Rather than shout from the mountaintop that he’s no crack user, that the cellphone video shopped around by purported drug dealers is a fake, that he’s been the victim of a fraud of colossal proportions, he’s flitted from home to city hall to cottage to, on Wednesday, the funeral of Toronto Sun founding editor Peter Worthington, where his presence was an unnecessary distraction and yet one more slapstick episode of duck-the-reporters and switch-the-cars.

What planet does Ford inhabit? Because even Ford Nation is abandoning it.

On Planet Ford, journalists chasing down one of the biggest stories ever to break in Toronto — and chasing because the mayor won’t square up to the allegations — are jackals disturbing the calm (as if) of his home and hearth. On Planet Ford, evidence seeming to show the mayor smoking crack in the company of drug dealers is grounds for hee-haw jocularity. On Planet Ford, the city’s politician-in-chief can blandly go about his (limited) business without confronting the allegations, just pretend there’s no crisis swirling.

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Denial, of course, has always been Ford’s de facto hidey-hole. But the truth has a habit of emerging —just as that Exhibit A tape will undoubtedly see the public light of day eventually, whether purchased with crowd-sourcing funds by Gawker, the U.S.-based website that broke the bombshell last Thursday, or some benefactor doing the city a huge service. The only way the tape never surfaces is if it’s already been snatched and stashed, possibly destroyed.

The “People’s Mayor,’’ Doug Ford called his brother yesterday, borrowing the language then-prime minister Tony Blair used to describe the dead Princess of Wales. If so, then the People’s Mayor is giving the People a middle-finger up-yours.

“Never has the mayor been so accessible or cared so much about the issues facing residents,’’ an emotional Ford the Elder told the no-questions-allowed press conference.

Not so accessible at the moment, though, huh?

“Now our mayor faces yet another accusation, an accusation driven by questionable reporting from a news outlet that has proven they would do anything to stop the mayor’s agenda.’’

That agenda has been thwarted not because of the Star but because Ford’s currency has become so devalued among his colleagues on city council.

Doug Ford then went off on a jaw-dropping review of his brother’s accomplishments over the past two years, as if it can all be sourced to the mayor’s office — right down to counting construction cranes and hotel room occupancy.

What does any of this have to do with the price of eggs? A promotional digest isn’t what the city needs to hear at this point of scandalizing convulsion — and revulsion.

“All of this of course is overshadowed by the constant stream of accusations coming forward against this mayor,’’ Ford continued. “Never, never, has a Canadian politician or his family been targeted by the media this way.’’

That’s not true, actually. But possibly “never, never, has a Canadian politician’’ provided critics with such an arsenal of ammunition: allegedly hanging out with drug dealers, seemingly drunk and incoherent at a public function, DUI-nailed in Florida, endlessly insulting and foul-mouthed, a chronic embarrassment.

Oh, you like that scabrous human edge, do you? Rather flawed than slick?

Doug Ford, shifting the focus, slammed Gawker. “Giving away prizes to try to raise money for drug dealers and extortionists is disgraceful.’’

Proportionately, less disgraceful than a mayor captured apparently sucking on a glass crack pipe, calling Justin Trudeau a “fag’’ and dissing those football teenagers he coaches as “f---ing minorities.’’

He won’t be coaching the Don Bosco Eagles anymore. Toronto’s Catholic school board dumped him Wednesday.

Barring an about-face from the mayor — stepping down at least temporarily while the whole video wrangle is investigated (are cops even doing that?) — Toronto voters won’t get a chance to do the same until the next election.

Pig-headed, heedless — and, one must admit, a slippery survivor — Ford won’t talk until he damn well feels like it, says his mouthpiece brother.

“When the mayor faces serious accusations, by no means will he be pressured by the Toronto Star to answer their questions on their time frame.’’

No answer is an answer.

And it’s not the Star filling in that blank.

Rosie DiManno usually appears Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday.

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