A cartoon printed in the New York Post on Wednesday has everyone in a hissy.

Check it: The toon depicts two police officers—one shooting down a wild monkey and the other saying, “They’ll have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill.” And blood. A lot of blood.

Say…wha?

Some think the cartoon is criticizing the stimulus package that President Obama signed into law earlier this week. (In other words, it’s so bad, a monkey may as well have written it.) Others think the cartoon is directly comparing Obama to an untamed monkey on the loose. Which is why the bang, bang bloodbath is…So. Not. Okay.

The Post defends the Sam Delonas cartoon and issued a statement explaining that the toon has nothing to do with race or Obama.  Rather, it’s a jab at the contents of the stimulus package by comparing them to the pet chimp that mauled a woman in Connecticut on Tuesday. The 200-pound animal was later shot and killed by police after it attacked someone else.

Get it? Stimulus package. Rabid chimp. They’re practically interchangeable, no? No? …No?!

Benjamin Todd Jealous, the president and CEO of the NAACP, issued a statement:

“NAACP continues to fight for a country where America’s promise can be realized for all and where racism is just a tragic memory.  We are saddened that the New York Post chose to create a symbol that is so divisive, insensitive and antithetical to that goal.  The NY Post must do better.”

The Rev. Al Sharpton had some say too:

“The cartoon in today’s New York Post is troubling at best given the historic racist attacks of African-Americans as being synonymous with monkeys. One has to question whether the cartoonist is making a less than casual reference to this when in the cartoon they have police saying after shooting a chimpanzee that ‘Now they will have to find someone else to write the stimulus bill.’

Being that the stimulus bill has been the first legislative victory of President Barack Obama (the first African American president) and has become synonymous with him it is not a reach to wonder are they inferring that a monkey wrote the last bill?”

As for the White House, Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said:

“I have not seen the cartoon, but I don’t think it’s altogether newsworthy that I don’t spend a lot of time reading the New York Post.”

Zing!

The editor of The Post, Col Allen, (finally!) issued an “apology” Wednesday evening:

“Wednesday’s Page Six cartoon – caricaturing Monday’s police shooting of a chimpanzee in Connecticut – has created considerable controversy.

It shows two police officers standing over the chimp’s body: ‘They’ll have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill,’ one officer says.

It was meant to mock an ineptly written federal stimulus bill.

Period.

But it has been taken as something else – as a depiction of President Obama, as a thinly veiled expression of racism.

This most certainly was not its intent; to those who were offended by the image, we apologize.

However, there are some in the media and in public life who have had differences with The Post in the past – and they see the incident as an opportunity for payback.

To them, no apology is due.

Sometimes a cartoon is just a cartoon – even as the opportunists seek to make it something else.”