NOVEMBER 22--An 81-year-old "birther" was arrested today and charged with threatening President Barack Obama’s life, according to federal court records.

Prosecutors allege that Elwyn Fossedal was in a post office near his Wisconsin home last month when he announced, “If President Obama was here I would shoot him right there and kill him right now.”

When Secret Service agents confronted Fossedal about the threat--which was relayed to law enforcement by witnesses--he would not recant the statement and “repeated the threat using different words. He also made a number of additional threats towards the President,” according to a felony complaint.

A Secret Service investigation determined that Fossedal’s wife Margaret Ann--to whom he had been married nearly 57 years--died in early-October and that “he is displacing his grief on her loss with anger towards” Obama and other public officials being protected by the Secret Service.

An investigator noted that Fossedal “is proficient in the use of various firearms.”

Pictured above, Fossedal this morning made an initial appearance in U.S. District Court in Madison, where a magistrate judge ordered him detained. If convicted of the threat, he faces a maximum of five years in prison.

Fossedal, a retired Pfizer employee, appears to be a “birther” based on comments he has posted online. A Rush Limbaugh fan, Fossedal has also called for Obama’s impeachment over the Affordable Care Act and declared that, “We need to throw the Muslim in the White House, OUT.”

In a funeral home obituary for his wife, Fossedal is reported as having resigned from the Lions Club International because the community service organization purportedly “would not allow the worship of Jesus Christ” so that it could “be accepted by Islamic Nations.” (4 pages)