He calls himself “Ol’ Clark,” and at 84 years of age, it’s an apt description. But then, an old fool is worse than a young fool, and Bill Clark is old enough to have no excuse.

The Columbia Daily Tribune has suspended columnist Bill Clark indefinitely after a public dispute arose over a column he wrote claiming his life was threatened when two sheriff’s deputies stopped his car in June.

Clark wanted desperately to “understand” what it was like to be a minority, a victim of police harassment, and so he manufactured a fantasy after he was stopped by two deputies.

I’m lucky I didn’t get shot. Sirens wailed and when I stopped, two officers were out of the sheriff’s vehicle. When I reached over to turn off the radio and then take my wallet out of my pocket to produce the driver’s license and insurance card, I realized my hands were not at the top of my steering wheel. Danger lurked and official arrogance was to follow.

Was he the next Philando Castile? Was he lucky just to survive the encounter? So it would seem.

I’ve just come to appreciate even more the words of those minorities when they speak of harassment and police arrogance. I had a good dose of arrogance on this evening and, in my rear view mirror, the image of the second officer out of the car, his hands ready in case I made the wrong move. My life seemed to be in danger.

I fully understand how a person can lose their respect for law officers. When you are in the shoes of the minority, you learn a lot more about their journey.

There’s only one problem with this deeply moving, passionate narrative by Ol’ Clark. It was a lie, a fabrication manufactured from the desire to prove police racism happens even when the police conducted the stop in exemplary fashion. We often ponder how police engage in impropriety knowing that their conduct is being caught on video. The same is true for Ol’ Clark.

You can see the video of the mundane traffic stop below. WARNING – It’s mundane:

And mundane it is. A complete bore. But after Ol’ Clark’s column, Boone County Sheriff Dwayne Carey investigated his deputies’ actions, called Clark and issued a statement.

First, let me tell you I contacted Bill Clark before writing this. I contacted him out of respect; something he did not show me or our department before writing his column. We agreed to disagree on the facts of the incident and he told me he stands by what he wrote. He then asked me to speak at Muleskinners on the last Friday of August, which I agreed to do. Crazy stuff, right?

What’s curious is that Clark, in response to the contact by Carey, “stands by what he wrote.” This is what comes of believing so hard in one’s fantasy that it becomes one’s reality. After there was no denying that Ol’ Clark’s column was a lie, he tried to rationalize his way out.

“When the officer approached, I had allowed myself to overreact. That was my mistake — and I still was overreacting when I wrote last week’s column,” he wrote in the apology. “That’s my fault.”

Lying to serve a purpose isn’t an overreaction. It’s just a lie. In this instance, a secondary effect was that the newspaper that published his lie found itself in the unenviable position of having posted “fake news.”

On Thursday afternoon, the Tribune’s managing editor, Charles Westmoreland, published a letter to explain the situation to readers.

“It certainly wasn’t worth writing a scathing column about, and the Tribune should not have published it,” he said.

Westmoreland said he met with Clark, and the columnist acknowledged he had made a mistake taking his frustrations out in his column and “blowing certain aspects out of proportion.”