Rumor has it that hand in hand with age comes wisdom. But as Ira Gershwin once put it, it ain’t necessarily so.

For instance, Pope Francis, 81, whose politics are to the left of Bernie Sanders, couldn’t resist getting on Donald Trump’s case over the Hispanic children allegedly separated from their scofflaw parents. You might have thought that the pope would have felt some responsibility to tell the Catholics of Mexico and Central America to respect our laws and to protect their children, but, as usual, he preferred to lecture those of us who don’t accept him as God’s right-hand man.

Being a South American socialist to his core, he sees no conflict between telling America we have to throw open our borders to anyone who decides he wants to come here while he himself dwells behind high walls and locked gates that are patrolled by armed guards.

In the meantime, the former archbishop of Washington, DC, Theodore McCarrick, 87, has been separated from the church because an investigation found credible proof that 40 years ago he sexually abused an altar boy. McCarrick, in his defense, said he had no recollection of it. Considering his age, it’s possible he also has no recollection what he had for breakfast.

Considering how many priests, bishops and cardinals have been found guilty of pedophilia, and how many hundreds of millions of dollars the various dioecies have had to pay out in lawsuits, I can’t help thinking that if the Church had to do it all over again, it would have kept the rule about eating fish on Friday, but changed the one preventing priests from getting married and having normal sex lives.

Saving the worst for last, we come to the kid in the threesome, Peter Fonda, 78. I am tempted to consider his satanic outburst as a textbook case of sibling rivalry. I can only imagine that he has been seething with jealousy over the fact that his sister Jane remains the object of hatred in certain quarters all these years after posing with the Viet Cong and betraying American POWs while he himself has pretty much faded into the woodwork.

What other explanation can there be for this elderly has-been to send out tweets calling Sarah Huckabee Sanders the C-word and suggesting that “We rip Barron Trump from his mother’s arms and put him in a cage with pedophiles and see if mother will stand up against the Giant A—h— she is married to”?

When he got a small taste of the outrage that has been directed at his treasonous sister, the aging hippie said he immediately regretted his tweet. But it couldn’t have been all that immediate because, apparently, there was time for the Secret Service to pay the schmuck a visit.

I really would like to believe that as people age, they grow wiser. But in Fonda’s case, I suspect he would have to live to be 190 before we’d see even the slightest sign of improvement.

---

Chuck Schumer and others on the Left kept insisting that President Trump should sign an executive order so as to keep illegal alien families together. So, Trump sucked it up, sighed and signed.

Yet even after Schumer pretty much admitted that Democrats had no intention of signing legislation that would provide financing for a border wall or bring an end to chain migration or the visa lottery, he continued to berate the president. Why? Was it because they thought that instead of signing the order Donald J. Trump, he had signed Donald J. Duck?

Or could it be that Democrats don’t really care about immigrants or the kids or the so-called Dreamers but are only concerned about coming up with an issue their pathetic candidates can run on in November?

Frankly, although the Republicans are pretty good at losing elections they should win, I think Democrats might be even dumber. That is especially the case whenever I hear Dianne Feinstein, Richard Blumenthal, Adam Schiff, Elijah Cummings or Elizabeth Warren pretending they care about anything other than regaining their majority in Congress.

For one thing, I suspect that most Americans are sick and tired of politicians pandering to people who have no business being here. For another, it was only a year and a half ago that 60 million of us voted for Trump. During that time, he has cut our taxes; removed business-killing regulations; worked to revise our onerous trade deals; revitalized the military; removed the ObamaCare mandate; brought industries back to America; delivered on his predecessors’ promise to move our embassy to Jerusalem; cut off foreign aid to the Palestinians; told our so-called friends and allies that we’re tired of being punked and that tariffs will now be reciprocal; gotten North Korea to at least discuss disposing of its nuclear capability; done his level best to prevent jihadists from entering the country; gotten us out of both the Paris accords and the Obama-Kerry deal with Iran; given military veterans the option of seeing their own doctors; displayed sincere respect to law enforcement; appointed a conservative to the Supreme Court; and even made me laugh a few times with his self-deprecating sense of humor.

I don’t care what the polls suggest. Nobody is going to convince me that the man is less popular today than he was in November, 2016.

---

I am always surprised when I learn something new about World War II. Even though I was a child when it was underway, there have been so many books and articles written, so many movies and TV shows produced, that I often feel as if I was right in the middle of it.

It is thanks to my friend, Art Hershey, the living legend of Calabasas, California, that I now know about a book written by Guy and Grace Woodward, The Secret of Sherwood Forest: Oil Production in England During World War II.

It seems that in all of England, there was only one oil well, and it was located in the happy hunting grounds made famous by Robin Hood.

On a good day, the well provided England with a meager 300 barrels a day. So a plan was devised and a deal was signed with the Oklahoma-based Nobel Drilling Company to drill 100 wells in a year.

Forty-two drillers and roughnecks from Texas and Oklahoma, mainly in their teens and early 20s, embarked for England in March 1943 aboard the HMS Queen Elizabeth.

Four National 50 drilling rigs were loaded onto other ships, but only three reached their destination; the fourth was sunk by a Nazi U-boat.

Apparently, the Brits couldn’t believe their eyes when they saw the Yanks punch a hole in a week, a job they assumed might take as long as two months. The guys worked 12-hour shifts, seven days a week, and within a year the Texans and Okies had drilled 106 oil wells.

Of the 42 youngsters who left the states, 41 returned. Herman Douthit, a Texas derrick-hand, was killed during the operation. He was laid to rest with full military honors and remains the only civilian to be buried at the American Military Cemetery in Cambridge.

“The Oil Patch Warrior,” a seven-foot bronze statue of a roughneck holding a four-foot pipe wrench, stands near Nottingham to honor the American oil men who came to England’s assistance at her time of greatest need. A replica stands in Ardmore, Oklahoma.

---

I recently mentioned that the marriage of Ernie Borgnine and Ethel Merman didn’t even last through their honeymoon, apparently because the belle of Broadway couldn’t bear the idea that so many more people recognized her husband as the star of TV’s “McHale’s Navy” and asked for his autograph.

That reminded me that competition of that sort often exists in show business. In all three versions of “A Star is Born,” when the male star’s career fades while his wife’s soars, Fredric March, James Mason and Kris Kristofferson don’t even consider divorce. The reality is so awful, they just kill themselves.

While that was fiction, it is widely believed that even though William Hurt had won an Oscar in 1985 for “Kiss of the Spider Woman,” he broke up with his girlfriend/costar Marlee Matlin in 1986, when she won the Oscar for “Children of a Lesser God,” while he had to settle for just a nomination. None of that phony “Winning isn’t that important. Just being nominated is enough of an honor” for him.

I have always wondered if at least part of the explanation for the topsy-turvy Liz Taylor-Richard Burton relationship was because she had been nominated for five Academy Awards and won twice, whereas he had been nominated seven times without ever winning.

If William Hurt and Richard Burton could have their noses bent out of shape over Oscars and Ethel Merman could care that much about signing autograph books, can you imagine what two-term president Bill Clinton has had to put up with, thanks to Hillary’s being a two-time loser?

I suspect the term “living hell” comes to his mind as readily as it comes to mine when I ponder what life would be like if she had defeated Trump.