Just when you thought the war in Iraq couldn't get any stranger, a high-ranking al-Qaeda figure who was first captured and then killed -- his body displayed on state-run TV -- turns out to have been a fiction.

He didn't exist.

The apparently invented character called Abu Omar al-Baghdadi was known as the head of the Islamic State of Iraq -- believed to be a front group for al-Qaeda.

He wasn't captured, as was reported previously. He wasn't killed May 1 by hostile fire from U.S. forces, as reported in a May 3 New York Times story. He wasn't even real, according to the U.S. military.

All this we learn from a leading al-Qaeda figure captured July 4 by U.S. forces in Mosul. Khalid Abdul-Fattah Dawoud Mahmoud al-Mashhadani, who in the interest of economy will be referred to hereinafter as "Smitty," told interrogators that Baghdadi was invented by Abu Ayyub al-Masri, aka Abu Hamza al-Muhajer, hereinafter referred to as "Jimbo."

According to Smitty, Jimbo invented Baghdadi to create the impression among Iraqis that al-Qaeda is a nationalistic group in Iraq when, in fact, the Islamic State was a Sunni Muslim insurgent group run by an Egyptian, who hired an Iraqi actor to read statements from the fictional al-Baghdadi.

Well, it's good to have all that straight.

If you're confused, feel the love. Confusion is the coin of the kingdom in Iraq, an always-reliable weapon made sharper by cyber-technology and alphabet-exhausting names.

Whatever else Baghdadi may or may not have done during his fake life leading up to his fake capture and fake death, he has effectively killed comedy. How do you satirize satire? How do you parody a parody? How do you caricature caricature?

In a war theater of the absurd, where war is waged by actors pretending to speak for fictional leaders, does the world die laughing?

Given that al-Baghdadi wasn't real and his organization existed in cyberspace, a cynic might be tempted to ask: If there's no Islamic State of Iraq except in cyberspace, is there also no al-Qaeda?

If there's no al-Baghdadi, is there no Osama bin Laden? Continued...