Do not feel like the Lone Ranger if you have been asking yourself the obvious question of the week:

If the brutal beating of Rodney King last March by out-of-control Los Angeles cops was not excessive force, what on earth is?

Thanks to a videotape of the incident by an amateur photographer, Americans have seen the Los Angeles atrocity replayed again and again on television over the past year, to the point where they can behold it in their sleep.

The travesty of justice that occurred in Simi Valley, Calif.,

Wednesday, when a jury acquitted the white police officers in the inhumane stomping of King, a black man, certainly lends new meaning to the old cliche that seeing is believing.

With its mind-boggling verdict, the California jury not only told us not to trust our eyes, but our inborn common sense as well — that what we saw on the infamous video tape was routine police procedure and nothing to get all hot and bothered about.

Then the spin doctors went to work to justify the verdict, leaving you and me to doubt our powers of observation even as enraged Los Angeles blacks set about burning down their neighborhoods in retaliation — pillaging and plundering as they went. (Not an especially smart move on the part of the firebugs, since they presumably have to live in the trashed city. But hey — this is America, man. Whatever lights your fire.)

One of the spin-control artists, a borderline-smug attorney who represented one of the accused police officers, contributed what had to be pretty much the best Freudian slip of the post-verdict circus Thursday on the Cable News Network when he made a statement he may have wished hadn’t come out quite the way it did.

The beating never would have occurred, the lawyer insisted, if the city of Los Angeles had not outlawed the use of the choke hold by L.A. police officers in subduing crime suspects. The hold was outlawed, the lawyer explained, after several black suspects collared by police were choked to death.

In the very next breath he said that if police had been authorized to use the hold on Rodney King, “this thing would have been over within 15 seconds.”

Yes, indeed. Maybe sooner if they had gotten a particularly good purchase on the dude’s neck.

Television viewers all over America, having already been told by the California jury that they could not trust their eyes, now were wondering if they could trust their ears. Could questioning of the public sense of smell indicating that something is rotten in L.A. be far behind?

A juror, interviewed after the amazing verdict, one-upped the lawyer when she claimed Rodney King was in control of the situation and could have stopped the beating at any time, presumably by yielding to his attackers.

No one has yet suggested that there should be a seven-day waiting period for the purchase of video camcorders, since the resulting insurrection would not have happened if an innocent civilian had not been out testing his new camera and captured the King bludgeoning on tape. But it’s probably only a matter of time.

So now we settle in for Phase Two of this horror show: election-year second-guessing, finger-pointing, name-calling, mud-throwing and maneuvering for political advantage by the various factions and assorted opportunist rabble rousers on both sides of the issue.

Phase Three, of course, will be the blood sacrifice of the four Los Angeles rogue police officers on the altar of public appeasement by the U.S. Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. Good sacrificial lambs are hard to come by these days, and the feds aren’t about to let four prime candidates slip away before the gods of retribution are satisfied. Feel free to consider these particular lambs goners.

In the meantime, even as the thousands of good cops througout the land are as sickened by what they saw on that videotape as you are, forces will be at work rationalizing the brutalization of Rodney King.

Hold firm. Your eyes did not deceive you. Be true to your gut instinct.

What you saw on that tape was excessive force. No amount of smooth talk by slick revisionists can change it, and no one with even a minimal sense of humanity can condone it.

Kent Ward lives in Winterport.