Kirby Delauter is not having a good week.

A council member of Frederick County, Maryland, he got into an online spat with local reporter Bethany Rodgers, attacking her for “for an unauthorized use of my name” in a “hit piece.”

In a Facebook post on Saturday, Delauter warned the reporter to never again “use my name or reference me in an unauthorized form.”

After Rodgers responded that reporters do not have to seek permission to write about public figures, the councilman simply wrote, “[u]se my name again and you’ll be paying for an Attorney [sic].”

BYW, the news article was about parking spots for county commissioners. Delauter got a one-sentence mention about supporting the complaints.

On Tuesday afternoon, Rodgers’ paper, the Fredericks News-Post, mercilessly mocked the councilman in an editorial entitled, “Kirby Delauter, Kirby Delauter, Kirby Delauter…”

“[H]ow should we now refer to Kirby Delauter if we can’t use his name (Kirby Delauter)?” the paper asked. “Could we get away with an entire editorial of nothing but ‘Kirby Delauter’ repeated over and over again — Kirby Delauter, Kirby Delauter, Kirby Delauter..?”

“Kirby Delauter’s ignorance of what journalism is and does is no joke, and illustrates one disturbing aspect too prevalent in conservatives’ beliefs: That the media are all-liberal stooges hell bent on pursuing some fictional leftwing agenda,” the editorial said.

The article mentioned Kirby Delauter’s name 27 times. It also contained one footnote: the words “Kirby Delauter.”

Finally, as something of an Easter egg for the careful reader, the first letter of each paragraph spelled KIRBY DELAUTER.

Today’s flavor of American conservative are united in their support for Free Speech and a Free Press. Their own. No one else should have access to such freedoms, of course. That would be like allowing civil rights for everyone.

That would be socialism.