Last weekend, Alan Keyes was arrested for trespassing. He and 21 others — including the pro-life activist Randal Terry — were demonstrating against Notre Dame University for its decision to honor Barack Obama. According to the report, “The protesters pushed strollers containing dolls covered in fake blood to protest Obama’s support for abortion rights and fetal stem-cell research.”

Lots of abortion opponents think that the exhausting charade over the Notre Dame “travesty” — bemoaned most loudly by people with no connection to the university — is harming their cause. In fact, Bishop John D’Arcy of Fort Wayne-South Bend, who is boycotting Notre Dame’s annual commencement ceremony because Obama is going, recently urged “all Catholics and others of good will to stay away from unseemly and unhelpful demonstrations against our nation’s president or Notre Dame”.

But Alan Keyes didn’t listen. He and Mr Randal apparently thought they would better serve the unborn by pushing around prams containing butchered baby dolls.

Keyes will probably again accuse the “smelly toad” of conspiring against him. Almost everyone else, however, will laugh at yet another incident in Keyes’s painfully funny descent from mainstream politics into wing-nut lunacy.

This, remember, is a politician who in 1992 defeated 14 rivals to secure the Republican nomination for the Maryland Senate Race. And in 2000, he came third in the Iowa presidential primary. Today, he is one the best-known crazies in American politics. Where, I wonder, will his story end? He faces trial on May 28.