2013 had its fair share of over-the-top political stories. | AP Photos The 10 craziest stories of 2013

An Elvis impersonator falsely accused of sending ricin-laced letters. A crack-smoking Canadian mayor. And of course, another sexting scandal starring Anthony Weiner. This past year had no shortage of outrageous, over-the-top political stories featuring everything from paternity tests to plagiarism.

( VIDEO: 2013 in five minutes)


Here are POLITICO’s top 10 weirdest stories of 2013:

Sexting with Danger

It was like 2011 all over again this summer, but with more Danger. Carlos Danger.

( PHOTOS: 8 times Weiner lied about lewd pics)

Disgraced former Rep. Anthony Weiner began his attempt to finagle his way back into public life in April with a New York Times Magazine profile of his post-congressional, supposedly post-sexting, life. Weiner officially began his ill-fated campaign for New York City mayor on May 21, repeatedly saying he and his family had moved beyond the scandal as he sought to keep his focus on the “issues.”

Enter Carlos Danger.

Turned out that Weiner had indeed continued sexting with women after leaving Congress, as photos, messages and his ridiculous moniker were shared. A woman, later identified as Sydney Leathers, came forward with sexually explicit online messages. And on July 23, he admitted that he kept having relationships even after he got caught the first time.

Weiner finished with a tiny 5 percent of the vote, and just after his concession speech, he gave a fitting goodbye to the reporters who covered his campaign as cameras caught him flipping off a journalist.

( WATCH: Anthony Weiner: Timeline of scandal)

All My Children, or Not

Like sands through the hourglass, so are the days of Rep. Steve Cohen’s life. And what a soap opera year it was for the Tennessee Democrat, complete with a surprise “daughter,” a shocking paternity test and a bunch of bizarre tweets.

It all started with a series of tweets — which were then deleted — between the congressman and a young woman. During the State of the Union address, Cohen and the woman had tweeted back and forth, with him writing, “nice to know you were watchin SOTU (state of the union). Happy Valentines beautiful girl. ilu” [I love you].

When questions were raised about the nature of the relationship between them, Cohen revealed that the young woman, Victoria Brink, was actually his daughter. He’d only discovered her existence three years ago, he said. “I Googled her mother, found out she had a child and the math looked pretty accurate,” Cohen said at the time. “The mom told me we had a lot of catching up to do.”

( PHOTOS: Scandal pols: Where are they now?)

In April, Cohen again got caught up in some Twitter drama, deleting a tweet to Cyndi Lauper that said “great night, couldn’t believe how hot u were” after he attended a performance by the singer. Cohen said later that he did it as a joke and to play a trick on the press. “Because in this age, which I learned a couple of months ago with a situation with some very loving tweets to my daughter, I discovered the best way to get a message out is to tweet and delete,” he said. “Because the press will immediately assume the worst, something salacious, something nefarious and jump on it.”

The story again took a dramatic turn several months later when CNN’s “New Day” had a paternity test done on Brink, with Cohen’s participation. The test revealed Cohen was not the father.

Rand Paul and the case of the copy and paste

The plagiarism charges around Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul — he was accused of lifting from a think tank study, an op-ed in The Week magazine, Wikipedia entries for the films “Gattaca” and “Stand and Deliver,” and more sources — stayed in the headlines for a few weeks in the later part of year, with ever-more examples of other people’s writing found in his book, speeches and op-eds.

( QUIZ: Do you know Rand Paul?)

“The footnote police have really been dogging me for the last week,” Paul told ABC’s “This Week” in November. “I will admit that. And I will admit, sometimes we haven’t footnoted things properly.”

Sure, “mistakes” were made in his office and things got a little “sloppy,” the Republican senator said. But Paul maintained throughout the controversy that it wasn’t plagiarism so much as a failure to footnote. Anyway, he told The New York Times, “this is coming from haters to begin with.”

Still, the charges ended up costing the Republican his regular column with The Washington Times, although he bounced back with a new gig at Breitbart. And Paul and his staff now carefully footnote his writing, making sure that even a quote from “Popeye” gets properly cited in a press release.

Beyoncé’s Sing-Off

Beyoncé’s surprise album release this month wasn’t the only thing the superstar singer did in 2013 that got noticed. Back in January, Beyoncé dominated the news with the question of whether she sang the national anthem live on Inauguration Day or not.

( PHOTOS: Top congressional scandals)

In the aftermath of reports that she may not have given a live performance, White House press secretary Jay Carney danced around the question, telling reporters that “I actually have no idea what’s true and what’s not about what happened here and I don’t think it’s particularly important to address from the podium here.”

The Marine Band, which accompanied the singer, added to the mystery when representatives released several differing statements about the incident, first telling news outlets Beyoncé had indeed lip-synced, but then backtracking by saying that “no one in the Marine Band is in a position to assess whether it was live or pre-recorded.”

It turned out that, yes, Queen Bey had prerecorded the song for her performance on the chilly January day. But in true pop superstar fashion, she put the issue to rest later at a news conference about her upcoming Super Bowl gig. Before taking any questions, she belted out a jaw-dropping live rendition of the national anthem — an over-the-top, but effective, effort to silence her critics.

“Due to the weather, due to the delay, due to no proper sound check, I did not feel comfortable taking a risk. So I decided to sing along with my prerecorded track, which is very common in the music industry,” she explained to reporters.

The Fake Interpreter

After Nelson Mandela’s memorial service Dec. 10, people couldn’t stop talking about the selfie President Barack Obama took with Danish Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt and British PM David Cameron.

But that wasn’t even close to being the strangest part of the event. The sign language interpreter who stood feet away from world leaders such as Obama as they delivered speeches was a fraud, using gestures that deaf groups called nonsensical. Thamsanqa Jantjie said he may have been suffering from a schizophrenic episode and claimed he saw “angels” during the service. He also fessed up that he had been violent in the past, and reports emerged that he had been charged with involvement in a mob that in 2003 had burned two men to death. He had never faced trial, however.

Later in the month, his wife announced that Jantjie had been admitted to a psychiatric hospital.

“Yes, I have smoked crack cocaine”

It took until November for Toronto Mayor Rob Ford to finally admit he had used crack: “Probably in one of my drunken stupors.”

The saga began when Gawker reported that a videotape existed showing Ford smoking crack and the website began crowdsourcing money to buy it (the money ended up going to charity instead). The Toronto Star published an account of the video as well. Ford knocked the allegations as “ridiculous.” In the months that followed, the Canadian mayor kept up the denials.

Until the November press conference. After police announced the week before that they had obtained a copy of the video, the mayor finally fessed up.

“Yes, I have smoked crack cocaine,” Ford told reporters. “There have been times when I’ve been in a drunken stupor. That’s why I want to see the tape. I want everyone in the city to see this tape. I don’t even recall there being a tape or video. I want to see the state that I was in.”

Two days later, another video of Ford surfaced, showing him talking about plans to kill someone and shouting “I need f———- 10 minutes to make sure he’s dead!” The mayor later said he was “extremely inebriated” at the time. But even in the face of scandal, Ford hasn’t resigned — and the football fan has even scored another gig as a regular call-in guest to a D.C. sports radio show.

The Tale of T-Bone

Some young kids have an imaginary friend. And so does a U.S. senator, according to some reports.

New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker’s drug dealer bestie T-Bone’s very existence was called into question again this year in a National Review story. Could the Democrat’s frequent campaign tale of the Newark drug dealer who once threatened his life before becoming his good friend be a fantasy?

The question of T-Bone’s existence first made a run in the press in 2008, when Esquire reported that Booker had admitted “that although T-Bone’s corporeal being is ‘1,000 percent real,’ he’s an ‘archetype’ of an aspect of Newark’s woe whose actual nom de crack may not actually be T-Bone.” Fast forward to Booker’s 2013 Senate run, where the story came back with a vengeance.

The conservative National Review dug into the controversy, asserting that T-Bone was a tale spun by Booker and quoting Rutgers University history professor Clement Price, a Booker supporter, who said the Newark mayor had confessed to him T-Bone was a composite. Booker’s spokesperson, however, told Slate that “this is a partisan attempt to revive a fake controversy from five years ago and make it a 2013 fake controversy” and pointed to the Esquire piece. T-Bone never materialized for an interview, photo-op or otherwise to put the story to bed. Undaunted, Booker won the election in a cakewalk.

Not Classy, San Diego Mayor

Accused of sexual harassment by multiple women, San Diego mayor and former Rep. Bob Filner spent much of the summer refusing to resign. First to go public with allegations was his former communications director. Then a dozen more women came forward in rapid succession with stories of the 70-year-old Democrat behaving inappropriately, forcing them into headlocks, trying to sneak kisses and making inappropriate comments.

Still, he didn’t resign, even as members of his staff left his office and the accusations piled up. Then, on July 22, attorney Gloria Allred announced a sexual-harassment lawsuit against Filner on the former communications director’s behalf.

Calls for him to step down came from across California and the country — from California’s senators, Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer, members of San Diego’s city council and Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, among others.

On July 26, Filner said he would take a leave of absence to undergo two weeks of intensive therapy in August — and then remain in office. He ended up leaving treatment early.

By the middle of August, the total number of women accusing Filner of sexual harassment had reached 19, with a great-grandmother, a retired admiral, city employees and military veterans who had been raped during their service among those accusing the former ranking member of the House Veterans’ Affairs Committee.

Finally, on Aug. 23, Filner stepped down in a deal with the San Diego City Council, and, in October, he pleaded guilty to felony false imprisonment and two misdemeanor battery charges. Filner was sentenced in December to three months of home confinement and three years of probation.

Jailhouse Rock

In April, the FBI arrested an Elvis impersonator from Mississippi suspected of mailing ricin to Obama and other public officials. Paul Kevin Curtis, 45, was released nearly a week later, with authorities determining he had been set up. Then the FBI turned to James Everett Dutschke, a taekwondo instructor who had a yearslong feud with Curtis, charging him with sending the letters and attempting to frame Curtis.

To celebrate his freedom, Curtis appeared on CNN and ended up regaling viewers with a live rendition of a Randy Travis song. Dutschke, meanwhile, has been in jail since April. In December, he pleaded not guilty to a new indictment that charges him with trying to recruit someone from jail to send another ricin-laced letter to Sen. Roger Wicker — and again trying to frame Curtis.

That wasn’t the only ricin tale of the year — Shannon Guess Richardson, a Texas woman and former actress, was arrested in June after claiming her estranged husband had sent letters laced with ricin to Obama and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg. She admitted to mailing the letters herself and pleaded guilty in December.

The Fugitive

The Edward Snowden story dominated the year’s news, from the leak itself to the repercussions of what the documents revealed about the NSA and government surveillance. But for all the substantial policy debates that rocked the political world, one question about Snowden commanded the headlines this summer and offered up the wackiest part of the NSA leaker’s tale: Where in the world was Snowden?

As a fugitive on the run, Snowden delivered what seemed like a plot out of a bestselling political thriller, with stops in global locations spanning Hawaii, Hong Kong and Russia. The question of where Snowden was — and where he’d end up — captivated the world. After his U.S. passport was revoked, Snowden boarded a plane to Moscow, where he stayed for 39 days in Sheremetyevo International Airport’s transit zone. Adding another twist, Snowden had a seat booked for a flight through Cuba and, although he never boarded it, a number of reporters did. On their flight to Havana, some passed the time by photographing Snowden’s empty seat.

Ultimately, he was granted temporary asylum in Russia for a year, setting the stage for a sequel in 2014, when Snowden’s asylum expires in August.