Just when I thought it was going to be a tough week to come up with material, along comes Dick Cheney.

If you haven’t heard by now (and if you haven’t, it’s really time to turn off that X-Box 360 for a few minutes), the vice president of the United States shot someone.

The story goes that while quail hunting with prominent 78-year-old Texas attorney Harry Whittington, Whittington moved off to collect a downed bird. Cheney was unaware of Whittington’s location when he was aiming at a quail and eventually fired his shotgun, spraying birdshot into the face, neck and torso of the unfortunate man only 30 yards away.

At the time of writing, Whittington was alive but having difficulty due to one of the pellets being lodged in or near his heart. Our thoughts and prayers are certainly with him.

Cheney violated the law by hunting without the proper stamp, and for some reason failed to immediately report the shooting to the police or media. It took him almost four days to make any public remarks. And when he finally did, they were to the notoriously soft-on-Republicans Fox News.

Naturally, Cheney has been — pardon the pun — the target of jokes all over the Internet and on late night talk shows. “Good news, ladies and gentlemen,” David Letterman told his audience, “We’ve found the weapons of mass destruction. It’s Dick Cheney.”

Jay Leno announced, “When the ambulance got there, out of force of habit they put Cheney on the stretcher.” Letterman added a pointed barb, joking that the sad part is that “before the trip, Donald Rumsfeld had denied the guy’s request for body armor.” And among Jon Stewart’s gems was his graphic, spoofing the Aerosmith song with the title “Cheney’s got a gun.”

But why is there so much glee at seeing Cheney’s misfortune? It seems to go well beyond the standard partisan dislike. And the explanation isn’t as simple as the tired “liberal media” myth.

To be fair, it’s possible Cheney is just the most misunderstood man in history. But the evidence justifies the perception of him as one of the most unsympathetic characters to haunt national politics since his one-time boss, Richard Nixon.

Or, to borrow a line from the old brokerage ads, Dick Cheney has generated his ill-will the old-fashioned way; he’s earned it.

He’s a man who, on the floor of the Senate, once told a United States senator to commit an anatomically improbable act to himself that rhymes with “duck.”

He repeatedly claimed, even in his 2004 debates with John Edwards, that Saddam Hussein had an “established relationship” with al-Qaida, a statement proved false by the Sept. 11 Commission Report and others.

He insisted on keeping many records of his 2001 energy task force secret, although critics assert these records would prove the administration’s energy policies have been heavily influenced by energy companies like Enron and Halliburton, the corporation of which Cheney had been CEO.

More recently, Cheney butted heads with Senator and fellow Republican John McCain (R-Ariz.) over a bill to prohibit the United States from torturing people held in its prisons.

And let’s not forget it was Cheney’s former Chief of Staff, Lewis “Scooter” Libby who was indicted on criminal felony charges for perjury and obstruction of justice in the investigation regarding the recent outing of an American spy.

So if the public seems more likely to laugh at Cheney than to sympathize with him during what must be a horrible time, he’s certainly earned it. And if many seem to enjoy it as much as seeing the Emperor cast into the bottomless exhaust tube in the Death Star at the end of “Return of the Jedi,” he’s earned that, too. And if Jimmy Kimmel jokes, “You know what they say: if Dick Cheney comes out of his hole and shoots an old man in the face, six more weeks of winter” … well, you get the idea.