The publishing world is abuzz this morning over Zbigniew Brzezinski’s stunning confession. Apparently, his 1998 book The Grand Chessboard was a whole-cloth fabrication.

Brzezinski, it turns out, was only playing with himself. And no, not chess. Checkers. Even worse, what should have been a down-home match-up between two warring sides of a Polish-American petit-aristocrat turned into a rout for all parties.

A chastened Brzezinski offered this: “It started out as a joke. Then it just got away from me. Before I knew it, I was polishing David Rockefeller’s shoes. When you’re Polish, polish has a certain resonance.”

Today, the world reels both at the breadth and scope of the deception as well as at the sheer tonnage of bombs dropped over the ensuing decades to cohere the planet, in essence, to the wrong playing pieces.

Asked why he spoke up so late in the game, his response was as cryptic as it was exoplanetary: “We have a saying in checkers. After you lose a tough game, there is only one thing to do, set them up and start all over again. Is Mars hiring?”

No Mujahedeen could be reached for comment as ISIS strictly prohibits public comments from its training staff.

As for the Illuminati, their policy is not to comment on sensitive personnel matters. However even they felt compelled, in this instance, to step out of the shadows. Indeed smoke signals could be seen billowing from Henry Kissinger’s tony Manhattan condominium window.

Said one hooded figure with an Owl’s head:

“We’re cross-checking our blood-oath files to see what the mix-up could be. Why we never demanded Mika [Brzezinksi] as a child sacrifice is an egregious oversight. Beyond that, as we were disbanded in 1776, we will be taking no further questions.”

Eyes wide open and smoke gets in your eyes.

Seasoned conspiracy buffs were quick to pile on with shaggy dog tales most of which require a decoder ring from a participating box of Corn Flakes.

The Council of Three Musketeers dispatched D’Artagnan to say that it has its hands full with a resurgent Assad regime, the collapse of Ukranian civilization, Greece’s pending exit from the euro, war drums in Venezuela, tightening the final bolts of the American surveillance state, fighting and funding ISIS, India’s growing rapprochement with China, et al, et al.

Suffice to say comments on the Zigster’s checkered past languish at the bottom of many nefarious organizations’ priority lists, most likely in their trademark invisible ink.