By now you’ve heard that President Trump snatched the security clearance of former CIA director John Brennan. And as a result, Brennan is hopping mad.

So he vented his spleen in an opinion piece in the New York Times, published Thursday.

“President Trump’s claims of no collusion are hogwash,” declared Brennan. He then wove a tale of how he, John Brennan, chief CIA spook, knew instinctively that the Russians were lying when they denied election interference. And super patriot Brennan told the head of Russian internal security service to knock it off during a 2016 phone call:

“When I warned Mr. Bortnikov that Russian interference in our election was intolerable and would roil United States-Russia relations for many years, he denied Russian involvement in any election, in America or elsewhere, with a feigned sincerity that I had heard many times before. President Vladimir Putin of Russia reiterated those denials numerous times over the past two years, often to Donald Trump’s seeming approval.”

Brennan then wrote of how he took his concerns to FBI head James Comey. They both agreed that the Russians were up to no good. They shared fears that unwitting Americans could be “pawns in Russian hands.” Russian goals, Brennan wrote, were to “undermine public faith in the American democratic process, harm the electability of the Democratic candidate, Hillary Clinton, and show preference for Mr. Trump.”

Frankly, I think Brennan’s biggest butt hurt was about Hillary’s failed electability, but I digress.

So what did Brennan do about this these alarms?

Nothing. Two-and-a-half months went by between that phone call and the election. Russian aggression went into overdrive. Yet not a thing was done about it.

Now part of that fustercluck could also fall on the head of Brennan’s boss, too. All Obama did was to tell Putin at a G-20 summit to back off, whereupon Putin smelled fear and continued meddling in the election.

But there’s more.

Sen. Richard Burr, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, says that Brennan’s claim that Trump colluded with the Russians could be an ‘intelligence breach.’ Here’s how Burr explained it:

“If Director Brennan’s statement is based on intelligence he received while still leading the CIA, why didn’t he include it in the Intelligence Community Assessment released in 2017? If his statement is based on intelligence he has seen since leaving office, it constitutes an intelligence breach.”

Hmm. Furthermore, Burr said, if John Brennan has that kind of information, he should be informing proper authorities — and that’s not the media:

“If he has some other personal knowledge of or evidence of collusion it should be disclosed to the Special Counsel, not the New York Times.”

So what, exactly, is this evidence of collusion Brennan refers to?

It was this statement from Trump on the campaign trail:

Yep, that was it. Trump made a smart-ass joke, and Brennan took it literally. As Brennan wrote in the NYT:

“. . . when Mr. Trump, then a presidential candidate, publicly called upon Russia to find the missing emails of Mrs. Clinton. By issuing such a statement, Mr. Trump was not only encouraging a foreign nation to collect intelligence against a United States citizen. . .”

Yeah, that’s some real super-secret collusion there — demand in front of thousands of people that Russia dig up Hillary’s emails. My head hurts from so much eye-rolling.

Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams said that the problem is because John Brennan ‘can’t understand an obvious joke:’

“So Brennan may have started one of the most important political witch hunts in history based on not recognizing a joke — and I’m not even making that up.”

Adams also agrees that Brennan deserved to lose his security clearance:

“Now, if you’ve got a guy who’s willing to put the entire stability at risk because he can’t tell the difference between a joke and a serious statement, then that guy has got to lose his security clearance at least. I wouldn’t want him anywhere near a decision. Would you? After seeing how Brennan responded to a public joke would you want him to make any important decisions about anything? I mean, that’s some scary stuff.”

But then, if you looked like Walter from Jeff Dunham’s puppet show, maybe you wouldn’t have much of a sense of humor either.

It looks like the pompous ass John Brennan really stepped on a rake with that NYT op-ed. Losing security clearance. It couldn’t have happened to a more deserving guy.