The shooter, Dan Burton, is back

"Watermelon Dan" is back (OK, so a former aide says he used a cantaloupe; not nearly as poetic), "still tilting at windmills, or large fruit as it were," reports the Post's amused Mary Ann Akers in her regular slot, "Behind the [Abnormal Psychology] Scenes in Washington."

Last Thursday, just in case you missed this, Indiana's 5th Congressional District crackpot "tried to offer one of the wackier amendments to the legislative branch appropriations bill," writes the intrepid Akers, "a measure that would order a cost-benefit analysis of building a transparent shield around the House chamber to protect members from getting killed."

"What this bill does," the neurotic Dan Burton pleaded to the House Rules Committee, "is it would authorize a study to look at enclosing the chamber, the gallery chamber, with Plexiglas so that somebody can't throw a bomb down on the floor and kill a lot of us."

Just before the committee -- sitting "dumbfounded, according to sources in the room" -- rejected Burton's evidential insanity, the paranoid pol helpfully detailed just how the dastardly crime could be committed:

"[A terrorist] could come in and kill half of the members of Congress right now. [He] could take a detonating device that looks like a watch so you could get through the metal detector. And when everybody was on the floor, as many as you wanted, you could put that into the plastic explosive, toss it out on the floor, and there is no way you would[n't] lose half of us if we were on the floor, at least, or more. I don't know how much damage it would do."

But that, of course, isn't the question.

No, the question is how much damage has already been done among the scattered synapses of Dan Burton's brain -- and, is it too late for Dan to avoid relocation from one large institution to another; a much, much happier institution where he'll be met not by dumbfounded looks, but by very pleasant and understanding smiles.