Mr. Chaos has apparently long been a fan of Adams; Gawker noted Monday that early this year, he was posting on Reddit that “It’s fair to say you disagree with Adams. But you can’t rule out the hypothesis that you’re too dumb to understand what he’s saying. And he’s a certified genius.” How fortunate for Adams there are people in the world not “too dumb” to understand the certified genius. It just happens that they’re all Scott Adams. On Friday, the cartoonist admitted on MetaFilter that he and plannedchaos are one and the same.  My tie! It’s curving upward in astonishment!

Adams didn’t invent the art of defensively conversing with or about oneself on the Internet – the practice of sock puppetry has a long and ignoble history. Five years ago, New Republic scribe Lee Siegel was suspended after the revelation that he’d been posting on his blog’s forums as “sprezzatura,” a fan who opined that “Siegel is brave, brilliant, and wittier than [Jon] Stewart will ever be. Take that, you bunch of immature, abusive sheep,” and told another poster who’d questioned his identity flat out that “I’m not Lee Siegel, you imbecile.” And in 2007, Whole Foods’ chief executive John Mackey, celebrated advocate of truth in labeling, was revealed to have spent eight years hiding behind a fake identity on Yahoo boards to disparage competitors, promote his company’s stock, and even praise his own alleged good looks. His alter ego, Rahodeb, once took the time to note, “I like Mackey’s haircut. I think he looks cute!”

In Adams’ case, his exposure as a self-aggrandizing Internet troll who enjoys talking about himself in the third person brought no apologies or admissions of shame. He instead rationalized his stunt, pouting to the MetaFilter community, “I’m sorry I peed in your cesspool,” and adding, “smart people were on to me after the first post. That made it funnier.” Ah, yes, like when he posted, “I hate Adams for his success too,” when he really was that awesome, successful Scott Adams in disguise — hilarious! It’s like when Lois Lane gets all worked up about Superman, and Clark Kent is just standing around like, awww yeaaaah.

As MetaFilter moderator Cortex gently explained to the certified genius, “If you wanted to sign up for MetaFilter to defend your writing, that would have been fine. If you wanted to sign up for MetaFilter and be incognito as just another user, that’d be fine too. Doing both simultaneously isn’t; pretending to be a third party and high-fiving yourself by proxy is a pretty sketchy move and a serious violation of general community expectations about identity management around here.”