(Optional Musical Accompaniment To This Post)

LISBON, MAINE—OK, I've had it. Fire all the writers. This TV series called 2016 has jumped the shark at a sufficient altitude that it is now clearing the rings of Saturn. I'm kicking around Stephen King country in northern New England with El Caudillo del Mar-A-Lago and, by the time I get to this tight little burg that probably is only 40 percent likely to be inhabited by vampires, the story of the election takes another violent twist and we find that the world's greatest democracy has ended up (again) at Anthony Weiner's zipper.

No kidding. Bloodbath in the Writer's Room. Nobody gets out alive.

In merciful brief, sometime shortly before Donald Trump took the stage in Manchester, New Hampshire, on Friday afternoon, FBI director James Comey released a letter that he had sent to a whole bunch of committee chairmen in Congress. The text, courtesy of The New York Times, reads as follows:

Dear Messrs Chairmen:

In previous congressional testimony, l referred to the fact that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had completed its investigation of former Secretary Clinton's personal email server. Due to recent developments, I am writing to supplement my previous testimony.

In connection with an unrelated case, the FBI has learned of the existence of emails that appear to be pertinent to the investigation. I am writing to inform you that the investigative team briefed me on this yesterday, and I agreed that the FBI should take appropriate investigative steps designed to allow investigators to review these emails to determine whether they contain classified information, as well as to assess their importance to our investigation.

Although the FBI cannot yet assess whether or not this material may be significant, and I cannot predict how long it will take us to complete this additional work, I believe it is important to update your Committees about our efforts in light of my previous testimony.

Almost immediately, every Republican, including the nominee that so many of them had spent the past three weeks denying, jumped all over this as Comey's having "reopened" the investigation that had cleared Hillary Rodham Clinton last summer, even though that is plainly not the case, as a careful reading of Comey's letter makes clear.

(Maybe this is a good thing, given the job he has, but James Comey has the political instincts of a tackhammer.)

Sarah Rice Getty Images

Trump took the stage and told the crowd that a) the investigation had been "reopened," and b) that he didn't think the FBI was part of the rigged system anymore. (That, I thought, was big of him.) "This," he said, traducing the good name of dead Dick Nixon, "is a bigger political scandal than Watergate." The crowd exploded, louder than any of his crowds have since at least the end of the Republican convention. Finally, they had their smoking gun.

OK, that's a bad metaphor for what came later.

In the time it took me to drive here from Manchester, the story turned into giddy vaudeville. It turns out that this had nothing to do with HRC's private e-mail server, or the 33,000 "missing e-mails" that we've heard so much about, or even Benghazi, for that matter. As the Times reported later on Friday afternoon, the e-mails to which Comey was referring came from an investigation of...hell, I can't even type this....

A new trove of emails that appear pertinent to the now-closed investigation into Hillary Clinton's private email server was discovered after the F.B.I. seized at least one electronic device shared by Anthony D. Weiner and his estranged wife, Huma Abedin, a top aide to Mrs. Clinton, federal law enforcement officials said Friday.

The F.B.I. is investigating illicit text messages that Mr. Weiner, a former Democratic congressman from New York, sent to a 15-year-old girl in North Carolina. The bureau told Congress on Friday that it had uncovered new emails related to the Clinton case...potentially reigniting an issue that has weighed on the presidential campaign and offering a lifeline to Donald J. Trump less than two weeks before the election.

In truth, Comey was effectively middled on this development. His earlier congressional testimony obligated him to keep Congress apprised of any new developments regarding the case, no matter how tangential those developments might be. That obligation held whether he learned that information 11 days or 11 minutes before the election. Since there is no way on earth any probe into these new e-mails will be finished before Christmas, let alone before the election, their relevance to who the next president will be rests solely on the use to which they will be put by the Trump campaign, by a suddenly unified Republican Party, and by the elite political media, which might see a chance to make a horse race out of what looked like a blowout 48 hours ago.

Jewel Samad Getty Images

As nearly as can be told, all we found out on Friday was that Anthony Weiner continues to be a stubborn skin disease on the Democratic Party, that it is very unlikely now that Huma Abedin will have a conspicuous place in any HRC administration, and that the script on the 2016 race for the presidency is now being written by five acid casualties and a basset hound. I'll tell you about Trump tomorrow. For now, I'm checking the news to make sure H.R. Haldeman has not risen from the grave.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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