In an episode of "The Simpsons," when Springfield is declared the fattest city in the United States Homer says, "In your face, Milwaukee!" Phoebe on "Friends" admits in a truth or dare session that the weirdest place she had "done it" was in Milwaukee. More recently, in a Washington Post article, John McCain said he would hate to live here.

The list of Milwaukee/Wisconsin media spankings goes on and on, but for the most part, we're okay with it. Maybe it's because Brew City backers know the truth: Milwaukee is more than Miller and Fonzie and Harley and Dahmer; it's one of America's best-kept secrets.

But Chicago Sun-Times columnist Neil Steinberg took it a curd too far when he wrote a column titled, "Leave the cheeseheads alone, for their sake and ours." In the June 9 column he wrote about a Chicago congressman blaming Wisconsin for Lake Michigan pollution (a theory which has been disproved by scientists):

"I flinched at his (U.S. Rep. Mark Kirk's [R-Ill.]) description of Wisconsin waste polluting Lake Michigan as 'cheesehead sewer water.' First, given that Chicago has been shipping its pollution down to St. Louis for a century -- why do you think they reversed the Chicago River? -- we're not in a position to lecture anybody. Second, while I'm normally indifferent to the feelings of the justly maligned, this is Wisconsin we're talking about. Have some pity. Don't you feel sorry for Wisconsin? I sure do. So close to Chicago, yet still an isolated nowhere of cows and dogtracks and cheese, populated by those who never got their lives together enough to move here. Wisconsin is like the dim brother who lives in the basement and nobody talks about."

We understand that Steinberg's words aren't intended to be taken too seriously, but we also felt compelled to defend ourselves. So we sent Steinberg an e-mail asking what his beef was with Wisco (and reminded him that 22 percent of all Wisconsin visitors last year were from Illinois, compared to only seven percent from Minnesota and three percent from Michigan.)

His response? Flip and ingenuine:

"I like Wisconsin. The Dells. The Mustard Museum in Mount Horub (sic). Lake Geneva. I wish I was there right now. I don't want to see Wisconsin made fun of ... and if I did so, gently, in defending her, well, nobody's perfect."

No, nobody's perfect, not even Steinberg, who misspelled "Mt. Horeb." Not Ben Woods and Carlos Zapata, the Boston-based architects who designed that spaceship they call Soldier Field. Not the Illinois doctors spilling over our border to escape ridiculously high malpractice insurance rates.

Eric Zorn, Chicago Tribune columnist, supports Steinberg's comments. "The good people of Wisconsin should feel honored to join the ... ever increasing group of people to be stung by Neil Steinberg's entertainingly swinging lash," he says.

Honored? It's difficult to feel honor from a paper like the Sun-Times, recently exposed by Hollinger International of inflating circulation numbers for years. Nothing like FIBS caught in a fib, or perhaps the Sun-Times is simply the Trib's dim sister.