Another bit of tinsel fell from America’s Christmas tree this week when Major League Baseball announced that Baltimore Orioles slugger Rafael Palmeiro had flunked

a random doping test and had been suspended for 10 days.

“Say it ain’t so, Raffy,” you could imagine little kids throughout the republic saying of their potential Hall of Fame hero. “Stupid is as stupid does,” you could picture some of their more worldly elders remarking when the subject inevitably came up in discussions at local watering holes.

When Palmeiro testified last March under oath before a congressional committee investigating the illegal use of performance-enhancing steroids by professional baseball players, he dramatically jabbed his finger in the air for emphasis and declared, “I have never used steroids. Period.”

Things could not be stated more clearly than that, he insisted. But Major League Baseball proved him wrong, clarifying things to a farethewell in its Monday announcement. Rafael Palmeiro never took steroids just as Bill Clinton “never had sexual relations with that woman, Monica Lewinsky,” baseball decreed, in effect. Now Palmeiro faces the prospect of Congress investigating whether he committed perjury in his testimony.

“If we did nothing, I think we’d look like idiots,” said Rep. Tom Davis, R-Va., chairman of the Government Reform Committee. Hell hath no fury like a congressional committee made to look like idiots in a high-profile case. Look for wall-to-wall coverage of “Congress Investigates Baseball – The Sequel,” coming soon on most any cable network you’d care to punch up.

So much for that old baseball adage about the best defense being a good steroid-fueled offense. Not that the glitch has altered Palmeiro’s adamant contention that he has never been a user.

When his suspension was announced Monday, Palmeiro remained doggedly on offense. He stood by his statement to Congress, saying he didn’t have a clue what could have caused the positive test which was conducted after his testimony and before he got his 3,000th major league hit last month.

That milestone, promoted shamelessly by Major League Baseball beforehand, even though the game’s overlords had to have known that Palmeiro had already tested positive for steroids, put the Baltimore superstar in the elite company of Hank Aaron, Willie Mays and Eddie Murray as the only major leaguers with 3,000 hits and 500 home runs.

In retrospect, it’s beginning to look like former player Jose Canseco – a pariah in baseball circles as an admitted steroid user and author of a tell-all book implicating Palmeiro, former legendary slugger Mark McGwire and others as users – may have been the only guy in the lot who was candid before the congressional committee last March.

That drama remains vividly in the minds of baseball fans who watched it unfold on television. Seated at the same table with Palmeiro in the hearing room were Canseco, confidently sticking by the charges made in his book; McGwire, suggesting that Canseco was a low-life liar, then uncomfortably asserting his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination, refusing to answer questions about steroid use and thereby seeming to confirm ugly rumors; Orioles slugger Sammy Sosa pretending to all of a sudden not understand English; and Boston Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling doing one of the things he does best, which is prattle on until you wish someone would stuff a sock in his mouth.

Palmeiro has said only that he tested positive for a substance he didn’t intend to take; that the evidence of the powerful steroid in his system – subsequently identified as stanozolol – had somehow arrived there by accident.

But experts who claim to know about such things say the steroid is not one that is likely to wind up in an athlete’s body through some nutritional dietary supplement taken casually. A user would almost surely have to have made an effort to take the substance on board, they argue. “It’s hard to reconcile that someone doesn’t know that they have steroids in their body. I’m extraordinarily skeptical,” said Rep. Christopher Shays, R-Conn.

Shays has lots of company. Still, perhaps Palmeiro can come up with a plausible explanation that will get him out of the bind he’s in, salvaging his Hall of Fame aspirations in the process. Not that you’d necessarily want to bet the farm on the possibility.

A sad part of this story is that so many professional athletes believe they have to ingest “nutritional supplements” to perform their jobs. Which begs a good old country-boy question: Whatever happened to just eating three square meals a day to properly fuel the body, as normal human beings do?

NEWS columnist Kent Ward’s e-mail address is olddawg@bangordailynews.net.