Every now and then, as I read supposedly hot news stories and the social media reaction to them, I feel ­myself growing a white goatee and having my white hair curl up on the sides of my head as I turn into Mugatu, the piano-key necktie designer from the movie “Zoolander,” while I shout: “Am I taking crazy pills?”

For example: The big story over the weekend that President Trump said in 2018 that he wanted to pull out of NATO. This is a story? Trump had described NATO as obsolete back in 2015.

Moreover, Trump has ­expressed deep skepticism of the value of alliances — any alliances — going back to 1987, when he took out an ad in the New York Times to warn we were being screwed by Japan.

The idea that Trump needed the Kremlin’s guidance to want to pull out of NATO or diss European allies is Mugatu-level preposterous.

The other crazy pill they are shoving down my throat is the story about how the FBI launched an investigation into Trump’s possible “collusion” with Russia following the firing of the agency’s then-director, James Comey, in May 2017.

The mainstream media are treating this story as a key piece of evidence that Trump is, in fact, a Russian asset. Now, look: Readers of this column know I am no fan of the president’s, and his ­solicitiousness toward Vladimir Putin dating back to the beginning of his campaign is one of the many reasons.

Even so, all this story shows is that something went very wrong ­inside the FBI under Comey’s stewardship. It also reveals how the liberal hatred of Trump in the journalistic class is leading to an abandonment of core principles when it comes to the proper conduct of law enforcement.

Much like their boss, Comey’s underlings displayed a terrifying sense of their own importance in the wake of his firing. Ironically, the evidence reveals the firing provided them with an opening to do what they had been longing to do for a while.

Two hours after Comey’s dismissal, one of those underlings, Peter Strzok, texted his colleague and lover Lisa Page as follows: “We need to open the case we’ve been waiting on now while Andy is acting.” “Andy” was ­Andrew McCabe, the FBI’s deputy ­director, who took over after Comey’s departure.

It should be noted that all three ­officials — McCabe, Strzok and Page — are now gone from the FBI, not least owing to a blistering report by the Justice Department’s inspector general that revealed not only their political and ideological bias but also that McCabe perjured himself under oath to federal investigators.

The idea that the acting director of the FBI should, as his first piece of business in the job, launch a probe into his boss — when it wasn’t at all clear he or anyone else had the authority to do so — suggests hysterical overreach.

We know this because McCabe brought up the matter to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein a week after the Comey firing. Indeed, McCabe apparently sought to enlist Rosenstein in an evidence-gathering effort against the president.

According to the most believable reports, Rosenstein responded with savage irony: “Well, what do you want me to do, Andy, wear a wire?”

They feared that the firing was an effort to obstruct justice when it came to the investigation of election meddling by the Russians. But in firing Comey, the president was acting in ­accordance with his constitutionally mandated power as the head of the executive branch.

Treating the president’s use of his executive authority as potentially criminal is the stuff of potential constitutional crises.

As it happens, the fallout from the Comey firing led directly and rather quickly to the entirely lawful appointment of special counsel Robert Mueller to perform the task these FBI officials had set themselves upon in lawless fashion.

Trump is an unprecedented figure, who behaves in unprecedented ways, so it is understandable that the response to his unprecedented actions would also be unprecedented.

Alas, an out-of-control FBI that collects evidence on political figures due to their political views isn’t unprecedented. The bureau had to repair decades of damage to its reputation after the revelations in the 1970s and 1980s that its founding director, J. Edgar Hoover, had used it to collect political intelligence on friends and foes alike.

Now liberals, who back then were at the forefront of the civil liberties crusade against the FBI’s political abuses, seem to be welcoming a return to those days. Man, would someone please provide me with an emetic to regurgitate that crazy pill!