I'm truly sorry

G. at he Junior Ganymede blog has been boasting about having originated "one of the worst puns ever written," so I think it's time to put him in his place.

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A long time ago in Russia there was a an ancient church famed far and wide for its beautiful art and architecture. One night a group of fanatical iconoclasts broke into the church and vandalized it, shocking all of Russia. While many parts of the church were damaged, the act that generated the greatest public outrage was the wanton destruction of the priceless and irreplaceable 10th century carvings of angels that had one adorned the large stone baptismal font. The font itself was still intact but was now bereft of all decoration.

The iconoclasts were apprehended, and such was the notoriety of the case that it came to the attention of the Tsar himself. He ordered that the perpetrators be temporarily locked up while he took his time thinking up a truly suitable punishment for such an enormous crime against art and religion. Finally, perhaps drawing inspiration from Dante, he decided that the vandals would be chained together, crammed into the very font they had vandalized, and "baptized" with boiling water. Despite protests from some that this punishment would be just as much a sacrilege as the vandalism itself, the Tsar stood firm.

However, it happened that one of the iconoclasts came from a wealthy and influential family, and his parents came before the Tsar and begged that their wayward son be shown mercy. The Tsar was a hard man, but such was their persuasiveness that in the end he agreed to modify his original sentence: All the other perpetrators would be tortured as planned, but their son would instead be exiled to Georgia for life, never to return to Russia on pain of death. The tearful parents thanked him for his kindness, and the Tsar sent the modified sentence to the local magistrate to be executed.

But imagine the parents' horror when, on the day of the punishment, their son was chained up in the baptistry and tortured together with his partners in crime! When they sent to the Tsar for an explanation, they found that he was just as astonished as they were. He was adamant that he had sentenced their son to exile only, but the magistrate was just as adamant that he had received orders to punish all the malefactors in the same way. Obviously the sentence had been changed by some unknown hand on its way to the magistrate. The Tsar ordered an investigation into the matter, and it was discovered that the Tsar's own copy editor was to blame. The copy editor confessed but insisted that it had all been a misunderstanding.

"A misunderstanding?" bellowed the Tsar. "How could you, a mere copy editor, possibly think you had the right to change a punishment decreed by the Tsar himself?"

"Begging Your Imperial Majesty's pardon," said the copy editor, "I naturally thought it was just a mistake when I saw that that one sentence was in Georgia while all the other sentences were in the same sans-seraph font."