The world’s in bad shape when you can’t believe everything you read on the walls of Baldwin Hall.

Flyers went out Monday night proclaiming that we here at the Campus wanted you to “Tell Us What You Think!!!”

At the bottom was a request to “Contact The Campus With Your Opinion” with our box number, phone number and my E-mail address.

The problem with the flyer is the large, fake newspaper clipping in the center with the title “Meadville Battles Drunks.”

The article was completely fabricated and incorrect, right down to the spelling of Meadville Police Chief David Stefanucci’s name, and we had absolutely nothing to do with the flyers — no, this wasn’t part of our Compost coverage.

The article claims that Stefanucci “has gotten” a bill (yes, just a bill, any old bill) passed that will allow him to not only hire an additional 20 police officers by the end of the year, but also raise taxes, tuition and bust every single party this Springfest. Assuming, of course, that a police chief has that kind of power.

They don’t.

The fake article clipping also includes just enough of a page header for the reader to assume that this article ran in the Meadville Tribune, although the newspaper uses a different font.

Pat Bywater, Executive Editor at the Tribune, said that to his knowledge they have never run an article with the title “Meadville Battles Drunks” and that Stefanucci hasn’t appeared at a city meeting or mentioned anything to the paper about hiring more officers or raising taxes.

“We didn’t have anything to do with it,” Bywater said. “It sounds completely fictional.”

Bywater also pointed out that most of the land the school owns isn’t taxable by the city, seeing as the school is a not-for-profit institution, meaning that any tax increase would not necessarily mean a raise in tuition.

In all, the flyer was nothing more than a poorly executed hoax, obviously pulled off by someone with no understanding of city government, Associated Press style or basic grammar.

What bothers me most isn’t the article, though, it’s the punctuation: if you are going to use three exclamation points at the end of a sentence, don’t put my E-mail address on it, and definitely not the name of this paper.