To the surprise of exactly one sourdough shut-in who lives in a mountain shack a few miles outside of Pagosa Springs, Colorado, the House of Representatives has introduced two articles of impeachment against President Trump. Talk about predictable.

Trump is charged with two counts of defeating Hillary Clinton fair and square on November 9, 2016, by election rules that have been in place for more than two centuries. OK, this charge and specification is not precisely outlined in either article, but anyone paying the slightest attention to the toxic circus our national politics have become knows this is the high crime the Donald stands accused of.

The charges come after interminable and unwatchable political theater in the House, overseen by Captain Ahab “Shifty” Schiff, the Mad Hatter of the House and chairman of the House Get Trump Committee, and Rep. Jerry Nadler of New York, chairman of the Other Get Trump House Committee, who is getting his back because the big boys picked on him in high school. These two nerds’ 15 minutes are beginning to feel like a year and a half.

In the days and weeks leading up to the November 2016 election, Democrats continuously lectured the Donald on the importance of his accepting the outcome of the election. Of course this was when all the smart people knew that Hillary Clinton would win. Then, as Private Gomer Pyle, USMC, was fond of saying, “Surprise, surprise, surprise!” The deplorables turned out to be right and the Donald carried the day in a close-run thing.

Not for one minute after Election Day have the Democrats accepted the outcome. For three years the Democrats have banged their spoons on their high chairs and invented transparent excuse after transparent excuse to cancel the results of the 2016 election. The latest is a frail delusion having to do with alleged pressure the Donald is supposed to have put on Ukraine — pressure neither the president nor the foreign minister of that country say they felt — to dish dirt on Joe Biden and his son in return for military equipment. This one is even more flighty than the expensive and long-lasting search for evidence that the Trump campaign conspired with Russia to steal the 2016 election. This sham investigation, conducted largely by Hillary Clinton donors, shouldn’t have even taken place. An honest and competent prosecutor couldn’t have issued a citation for jaywalking on the probable cause that the Trump campaign colluded with the Russians. The Mueller probe (a probe not unlike the one I endure at my annual urological exam) was an investigation in search of a crime. It never found one.

This latest Democrat hallucination, which they’ve labored themselves and us with these many weeks now, is even thinner gruel than Oliver Twist was fed at the workhouse. If this were a football game, Trump’s impolitic mentioning of the Bidens in a conversation about military assistance to Ukraine might — I say might — call for a five-yard penalty. No loss of down. Certainly not expulsion from the game. It’s a trifle. To paraphrase Churchill: “Never in the field of political conflict, have so many debated, harangued, and postured so dishonestly over so little.”

South of the border when they stage a coup they surround the presidential palace with tanks. This is a quicker, more honest, and far less dreary way to put the thing through than the slow-motion torture the Democrats are subjecting the country to. We could learn a bit from our neighbors to the south. As it is, they’re snickering at us in Argentina. And why not?