The Scrapbook confesses that it takes a certain unhealthy interest in recent accounts of Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chávez’s exhumation of the corpse of Simón Bolivar. No disrespect to the Liberator is intended here, of course; but the details could hardly be invented.

Chávez seems to believe that he is the (literal) reincarnation of Bolivar, and is also convinced that Bolivar did not die of tuberculosis in 1830, as is generally understood, but was murdered—probably, in Chávez’s imagination, by Colombia or the United States.

To be sure, the fact that Chávez is so attached to the man who won Venezuela’s independence from Spain​—he keeps an empty chair at cabinet meetings in case the Liberator should stop by—is a puzzlement in itself. Hugo Chávez seems to have a kind of obsessive hatred for the United States of America and its system of government; Simón Bolivar was not just a friend and admirer of the U.S. presidents of his day, but regarded himself as a Jeffersonian democrat, and carried a copy of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations into battle against the Spanish.

Readers will be interested to know that Chávez tweeted the proceedings, as Bolivar was moved from his burial place into a new coffin featuring the Chávez government seal, and that Chávez delivered a speech on Vene-zuelan television in which he implored Christ (unsuccessfully, as it turns out) to raise Bolivar from the dead.

All of which raises an interesting, and ominous, problem. The global village has often harbored national leaders who might be described as mildly eccentric—Prince Sihanouk of Cambodia, Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi—and a few whose eccentricities lapse into malevolence: Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi, Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe. But Hugo Chávez, in The Scrapbook’s considered view, appears to be insane: unstable, delusional, paranoid, violent. This has not prevented him from earning the allegiance of assorted foreign admirers—Sean Penn and Oliver Stone from Hollywood, Amy Goodman of radio’s “Democracy Now!”—but it deepens the misery of the Venezuelan people and surely endangers Vene-zuela’s neighbor, Colombia. Indeed, the Colombian government has recently demonstrated, in categorical detail, that the Chávez regime provides safe haven for thousands of FARC guerrillas, whose narco-terrorism has sought to destabilize Colombia for years.

It’s tempting—in truth, it’s irresistible​—to delight in the lunatic behavior of Hugo Chávez as he carries on his necromance with the late Simón Bolivar. But the comic details of such bizarre behavior mask a deeper, and catastrophic, pathology of misrule and regional peril.