Jussie Smollett’s story is what the prudish New York Times used to call “a barnyard epithet.” You know and I know it. The Chicago Police Department knows it, and said so. The Chicago mayor knows it, and said so.

From the great Subway Sandwich Assault of Jan. 29 through to the Valentine’s Day fable Smollett told Robin Roberts on “Good Morning America,” everything Smollett said was preposterous, and he couldn’t even stick to one fake account, he had to keep rewriting it. Initially he didn’t tell police his attacker dudes yelled, “This is MAGA country.” Then by the time he told the story to Roberts it was completely different; no longer did two guys come at him at once, but one snuck up behind him while he had his hands full with the first one. Oh, and this time he fought back valiantly, which he hadn’t told the police.

In all versions of the story, the vicious thugs daintily draped a noose they just happened to have with them around his neck but just left it dangling there like a necktie.

Never did Smollett explain how two guys who knew him from “Empire” somehow knew where he would be at 2 a.m. even though he himself had decided just moments earlier to go to the Subway shop outside of which they lurked, scheming with their bleach and rope.

State’s Attorney Kim Foxx’s office didn’t say that new evidence had emerged that cleared Smollett of the charge of faking a hate crime. It didn’t say it lacked the evidence to proceed. It certainly didn’t say Smollett was innocent. Much the opposite. Her office hinted that he was guilty but considered him to already have been punished sufficiently, by forfeiting a $10,000 bond and performing some previously unreported community service.

In other words, Smollett was granted a plea bargain without the most important part, which is the plea. He accepted (some) punishment without admitting guilt.

This kind of travesty is straight out of Al Capone’s Chicago. “In our experience, innocent individuals don’t forget bond & perform community service in exchange for dropped charges,” Police spokesman Anthony Guglielmi tweeted.

Assistant State’s Attorney Joe Magats, who actually made the call to drop charges after Foxx recused herself from the case, clarified, “We stand behind the investigation, we stand behind the decision to charge him and we stand behind the charges in the case. The mere fact that it was disposed of in an alternative manner does not mean that there were any problems or infirmities in the case or the evidence.”

I’m not sure this guy understands the actual definition of “standing behind.” When I say I am standing behind you, I don’t mean I’m there with the intent to shorten your legs at the knees with a machete.

The prosecutors destroyed three solid weeks of police work involving a squadron of detectives who knew the victim was full of barnyard epithet from day one but had to use considerable skill and ingenuity to prove it. If I were a Chicago detective, I’d be thinking about calling in sick for about the next four months.

Why protect and serve a city that disrespects and spurns?

Entirely predictably, as the prosecutors were saying, “We’re gonna let this guy slide,” Smollett was whooping it up, claiming he had never lied, that he had been completely vindicated and that he would join O.J. Simpson in dedicating the rest of his life to finding the real offenders. Smollet’s lawyers beamed but his doctors worried that he might sprain a wrist patting himself on the back.

How did the prosecution not foresee this noxious state of affairs? Let criminals boogie without wringing an admission of guilt out of them and of course they’re going to pop a Champagne cork in your face.

Hate-crime hoaxes do immense damage to our social fabric and tie up police resources better spent on actual crimes, which kinda matters when your city has more than five times the murder rate of New York.

Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s anger was as off-base as his grammar: “How dare him!” he said of Smollett, castigating the actor for being “let off scot-free with no sense of accountability of the moral and ethical wrong of his actions.”

Don’t blame Jussie, blame the Cook County State’s Attorney’s office. Even by Chicago standards, this is pretty Chicago. In the Windy City, if liars get rewarded, it’s now open season on the truth.