Let’s start with the obvious: Chris Wray is being ill-served, either by a Trump-deranged member of his staff or by the opposable thumb and fingers with which he manipulates the remote control each night.

We say this because someone on the 7th floor of the J. Edgar Hoover Building, or someone with undue influence upon the director of the FBI, has been watching way too much MSNBC.

“I think with respect to former President Trump,” said Wray during his testimony last Wednesday before the House Judiciary Committee, “there’s some question about whether or not it’s a bullet or shrapnel that, you know, hit his ear.”

Say what?

Two weeks into the one-inch-away assassination attempt, and the Trump-hating, election-interfering Keystone Kops at the FBI still can’t tell us what motivated or radicalized the would-be assassin. But they’re trying like hell to suggest that Trump didn’t really get shot by a bullet, even though we have a remarkable image from Doug Mills, a New York Times photographer, of a bullet whizzing past his head at ear level. And even though, in that same image, Trump is already reaching his right hand up toward his right ear.

This means the bullet in the photo wasn’t the first shot fired at Trump by the 20-year-old would-be assassin. And thus, it means that Director Wray wants us to believe that the assassin’s first, best, easiest shot was so woefully off target that it hit the lectern or the teleprompter in front of Trump, causing a piece of shrapnel to launch upward and magically level off and wrap around Trump’s head to scoop out only the very top of his right ear?

Really? Honest and for true?

We first noted the dim-witted director’s magic-shrapnel bullet theory late Friday morning. And as far as we know, Wray isn’t a ballistics expert. Nor is he privy to Trump’s medical records. Nor has he discussed the injury with the doctors who treated the former president. And yet the FBI director nonetheless saw fit to advance an utterly implausible theory being grasped at only by desperate Democrats deep in the throes of TDS.

Said Trump in response: “FBI Director Christopher Wray told Congress … that he wasn’t sure if I was hit by shrapnel, glass, or a bullet (the FBI never even checked!), but he was sure that Crooked Joe Biden was physically and cognitively ‘uneventful’ — Wrong!”

As Friday wore on, however, the outrage at the idiocy of the remark grew until it rightfully reached a crescendo.

“During the Congressional Hearing two days ago,” said Ronny Jackson, Republican Congressman and former White House physician to both Barack Obama and Donald Trump, “FBI Director Christopher Wray suggested that it could be a bullet, shrapnel, or glass. There is absolutely no evidence that it was anything other than a bullet. Congress should correct the record as confirmed by both the hospital and myself. Director Wray is wrong and inappropriate to suggest anything else.”

Later that day, the FBI itself was forced to make what, as near as we can tell, was an unprecedented, er, clarification of its leader’s jaw-slackening remark — a remark that had theretofore been confined to the fever swamps: “What struck former President Trump in the ear was a bullet,” said the bureau in a statement, “whether whole or fragmented into smaller pieces, fired from the deceased subject’s rifle.”

As columnist Byron York put it: “FBI clarifies — it was a bullet — only after Director Wray fed the conspiracy theorists, who won’t believe it when the FBI says what really happened. Wray was incredibly irresponsible — or worse — to speculate as he did.”

Said a magnanimous Trump: “I assume that’s the best apology that we’ll get from Director Wray, but it is fully accepted!”

Accepted or not, what we got from the FBI was a brief but devastating correction of its own director. And it was entirely necessary.

What’s equally stunning here, though, is the mindset that would allow an ostensibly sober-minded FBI director to utter something so jaw-slackeningly foolish and thereby give it a whiff of legitimacy. It was an unscripted remark, not prompted by any direct question from a sneaky Republican congressman trying to trap or troll him.

Indeed, Wray trolled himself. It would be akin to the FBI director suggesting that the FBI is investigating whether Barack Obama’s birth certificate is real, or whether the 9/11 attacks were an inside job, or whether Hunter Biden’s laptop was a Russian disinformation operation.

Oh, wait.

These, then, are the new Birthers, the new Truthers, the new Laptoppers. And Chris Wray, the leader of the Federal Bureau of Investigation — as opposed to the Federal Bureau of Far Out Conspiracy Theories — is giving them succor.

Do better, Director Wray. Do a lot better.

Or resign in disgrace.

UPDATE: In breaking news from the Babylon Bee, the FBI has determined, after a decades-long investigation, that on November 22, 1963, “President John F. Kennedy was, in fact, struck by a bullet.”