With all the weirdness of the past week, including the nominations of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Matt Gaetz for Cabinet positions in the incoming Trump administration (as both are consummate professionals and qualified and would never endanger the missions of their departments … yeah, I can’t keep a straight face on that), the news that the Onion had bought Infowars at first seemed like a joke.

The very best kind of joke for someone like me, especially upon learning that the Onion has plans to relaunch Infowars as a parody of itself.

Alex Jones was forced to put the Infowars site and other assets up for sale to pay about $1.5 billion in damages to a group of Sandy Hook families for repeatedly claiming the 2012 mass shooting at the Newtown, Conn., school was a hoax. The Onion won a bankruptcy auction for the site Thursday, with the families agreeing to take a smaller payout to increase the value of the satirical site’s bid. Everytown for Gun Safety would be the exclusive advertiser on the site, planned for relaunch in January.

For now, though, those plans are on hold after lawyers for Jones and a company affiliated with him cried foul, calling the sealed bidding process “rigged.” (Where have I heard such claims before? Hmmmmm …)

The Washington Post reported: “At the court hearing Thursday, the trustee overseeing the bankruptcy auction said the Onion did not have the highest bid, but that the Sandy Hook families’ agreement to forgo some of their defamation award to pay off Jones’ other creditors made the Onion’s bid the best overall deal, according to the Associated Press. The trustee, Christopher Murray, did not share the dollar amount of the Onion’s bid, but said he followed the rules laid out by the judge that allowed him to skip a round of bidding that would have let interested parties try to outbid each other.

“[Judge Christopher] Lopez said he had concerns about the process and its transparency. ‘We’re all going to an evidentiary hearing, and I’m going to figure out exactly what happened,’ he said, according to the AP. ‘No one should feel comfortable with the results of this auction.’”

Onion CEO Ben Collins, a former Washington Post staff member, told The Post that the idea to bid on the Infowars site came shortly after a bankruptcy judge ordered Jones to sell his personal assets to satisfy his debt to the Sandy Hook plaintiffs.

“It was either Alex doesn’t pay a price for this in any way and continues unabated, or we make a dumb little website that is the funniest joke in the world,” Collins said. “Thankfully, we are good at cosmic justice.”

(They’re also pretty darn good at satire, such as “Trump Locks Bathroom Door So Elon Musk Can’t Follow Him In.” Just sayin’.)

John Feinblatt, the president of Everytown for Gun Safety, “said the Onion partnership was a ‘no-brainer’ because it could bring a level of satisfaction to the Sandy Hook families in part by allowing them to see ‘a bastion of hate and misinformation’ turned into a vehicle that uses satire to express an incisive truth,” reported The Post.

“To think with the unimaginable pain that Alex Jones visited on the Sandy Hook families and that now we’re joining forces with the Onion to write Infowars’ next chapter—particularly when it comes to gun safety—it’s sort of irresistible, poetic justice,” Feinblatt said.

Sandy Hook parent Robbie Parker, whose 6-year-old daughter Emilie was one of the 20 children killed at the school, said in a statement: “We were told this outcome would be nearly impossible, but we are no strangers to impossible fights. The world needs to see that having a platform does not mean you are above accountability—the dissolution of Alex Jones’ assets and the death of Infowars is the justice we have long awaited and fought for.”

According to Politico, only two bids were received, that of the Onion and Jones’ First United American Companies, which markets dietary supplements in Jones’ name. Jones’ bid was $3.5 million. (Wait … I thought he had no money … seems sketchy that he’d be allowed to bid in the first place anyway.)

Politico reported that the Onion was announced as the winner of the auction Thursday. “Hours later, Infowars headquarters in Austin, Texas, and its websites were shut down and Jones was broadcasting from a new studio he had set up before the bankruptcy auction. By Friday morning, Infowars and its websites were back up and running for reasons that were not entirely clear.”

(Again … filed for bankruptcy, yet set up a new studio beforehand, clearly planning to continue Infowars regardless … what’s wrong with this picture?)

Though Lopez said he had expected prospective buyers to get a chance to outbid each other, reported Politico, “[h]is 20-page order on the sale procedures in September … made such a bidding round optional. And it gave broad authority to Murray to conduct the sale, including the power to reject any bid, no matter how high, that was ‘contrary to the best interests’ of Jones, his company and their creditors.”

Whatever happens in the court hearing this week, one thing is for sure: Last week’s headlines about the Onion were probably the most heartening this month.

One might wonder why the news of the Onion’s potential purchase of Infowars so cheered me and many others, especially considering that the Onion has managed to fool even seasoned journalists before (the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette hasn’t been immune, having picked up an item about a new “fixins” category for the USDA food pyramid back in 2002).

I mean, after all, so many of us believe in fact-checking and keeping misinformation at bay. That’s why several letters never made it in during election season (aside from the late surge in letters that meant we had to toss aside several approved and edited missives); repeating misinformation, especially without attributing it to its source, is gonna be a hard no, and there was a lot of it thrown around (so many were nearly word-for-word repeats of Trump and Trump-delegate claims about Kamala Harris, though there were one or two about Trump that didn’t pass the sniff test).

The difference here is that, should the Onion’s purchase go through (please, please, please!!!), it will take a major source of misinformation out of the media ecosystem, making certain that people know that what appears there is satire and only that. Plus it takes Jones’ dubious diet-supplement business off the board (Global Tetrahedron CEO Bryce P. Tetraeder [a parody himself] promised on the Onion to “boil the contents down into a single candy bar-sized omnivitamin that one executive … may eat in order to increase his power and perhaps become immortal”).

Sometimes you have to take your wins where you get them. Any comeuppance for someone as odious as Alex Jones is a win.