Only The Wire could make a drive-by shooting scene funny.

And I mean funny.

Snoop & Co. decide to go all Boyz in the Hood and just fire a whole lot of shots at three guys on the corner they’re trying to kill.

Every single shot misses; Snoop’s gotta get out and take careful aim. Naturally, then she performs a perfect execution, a shot in the back (was it his head?) from quite some distance in the dark on a running target.

She scoffs at the “West Coast” boys who just spray a corner with lead and hope for the best. In B-more, she brags, they make sure they take care of business.

And so I come to ponder another week of The Wire (eight episodes left, fans).

I’ve gotta admit, Lester almost had me convinced at the beginning of the episode that the Clay Davis case was indeed extremely important. OK, it is important; I don’t mean to make light of political corruption.

But how glad was I to see him slouched down in his car, a couple of blocks away from where Marlo was conducting business – conducting it more in the open than he has in quite some time, now that he knows the cops aren’t actively watching him?

Lester, I love ya, man.

The politics of crime are simply astounding, however. I really wish I could have been shocked by the fact that the FBI wasn’t interested in solving the 22 dead bodies case because Carcetti ticked off the U.S. Attorney.

I wish. Unfortunately, it rang all too true in our hyper-politicized times. (Side note: how freakin’ funny was the scene where Lester and McNulty mess around with their FBI friend in the parking lot?)

Davis’ blowout with Burrell made it clear that if Davis goes down (and given that this is The Wire, that’s not a certainty to happen, no matter how bad the dude is), he’s taking whoever he can with him.

It was one of the only times I’ve felt kindly toward Burrell. I don’t think he’s really a bad cop; I think that once he got into the halls of power, like anyone else, he liked it. And he’s done what he’s needed to do to stay in power. If that meant playing politics with the crime stats, that’s what he’d do. But deep down, I don’t think he really cares that Davis is going to go down. Davis played politics right along with the rest of them. If he’s going to pay for it now, Burrell’s not going to shed a tear — for Davis or anyone the state senator takes down with him.

I was glad to see Michael speaking up last night, even though I was just as glad to see him shut up so he doesn’t get himself shot or killed for being a wiseass. It showed that Michael’s not gone completely over to the dark side; he’s still redeemable. Just because someone tried to spread the word that Marlo was gay was indeed a stupid reason for Marlo to want to kill him. But at the same time, even I understood that in the world they live in, of course Marlo had to pop him.

And Michael choosing not to shoot the little boy who runs out the back of that house was a shining moment for the young man. Snoop’s really hardcore, and probably would have shot the kid. Or maybe not. One thing about this show is that you can never predict what’s actually going to happen.

So Kima saves the other kid in the house, who’s been hiding in the closet since the shooting. The emotion that lady had on her face was moving, man! I love this woman. But Kima, give Alma Gutierrez some time; talk to her. Alma’s a good reporter and just wants to give stories their due. It’ll be worth it, I swear!

That brings us to one of our other homicide cops—McNulty.

He’s off the hook.

To be honest, when he first started messing with the murder scene, I thought he saw something that Bunk didn’t. I really thought he was onto something, though I couldn’t figure out, for the life of me, what that might be.

He’s faking a serial killer?

I mean, I know he’s frustrated with the fact that he had to take a freakin’ bus to a crime scene (wow). I know he’s pissed off beyond belief that no one cares about 20+ dead black people found in abandoned buildings throughout the city. I know he can’t even comprehend how Major Crimes was disbanded. Again.

But one thing you could always say about McNulty, even in his previous heavy-drinking, womanizing incarnations, was that he was a damn fine cop.

Now what’s gonna happen to him? He’s only going to slide down that slippery slope even further. Hell, Bunk’s finished with him! No easy feat, that. Why do I have the (uneasy) feeling that McNulty’s going to end the series disgraced and drunk?

Everyone’s lives are crashing down around them.

You just know that it’s only a matter of time before Bubbles … well, I’m not sure that he’ll go back on the junk, but something bad is going to happen. He still can’t cope with what happened to Sherrod, and his sponsor is totally right to be pushing him to talk about it. I just fear that before he manages to talk about it, he’ll try to kill himself again.

He’s totally eaten up inside and he can’t really figure out how to cope with it. I think he’s afraid that if he talks about it, it’ll be even worse, emotionally, than letting it eat him up inside. Because if he talks about it, he’ll get support and he’ll be told that it was the junk and that being off the junk, basically, lets him off the hook. But Bubbles knows he can’t use the junk as an excuse. He feels responsible, whether it was because he was on the junk or not. He made the choice to become a junkie. Just because he was on the junk doesn’t make it the junk’s fault, you know?

And now, we come to the newspaper.

I leave this part for last each week because I probably have far too much to say about it and don’t want to make y’all wade through all this to get to my thoughts of the week on everyone else.

First off, I have to say that at the moment, I had sympathy for Templeton. Trust me, every reporter has had an assignment that’s basically extremely simple — in this case, a color piece on the Orioles’ season opener — but it turned out to be excruciatingly difficult for any variety of reasons, all beyond the reporter’s control.

But that’s where my sympathy ended. First off, he slimed his way into covering the story in the first place. Every journalist has run into one of these reporters in his or her life, as I mentioned last week — the reporter who thinks he’s far better than everyone around him and better than the assignments he has been given. So they worm their way into the good graces of the higher-ups, usually by dropping names of mutual acquaintance and/or brown-nosing.

Look, everyone’s fallen for false flattery in their lives and top editors are no different. It’s easy to develop a good impression of someone who’s always chatting you up and making you feel good. Sorry, but no one’s immune. No one. Though, some are less immune than others, and Whiting is in that category.

And that false flattery, paired with a well-written tale, as much as I hate to admit that it could ever happen, could lead to a fake story like Templeton’s getting into print.

My first, visceral reaction to that scene was that would never happen.

And even now I still believe it is unlikely to happen.

But if the story was written well enough and one had no reason to doubt the reporter, who appears to be a sharp, talented youngun’ on the rise, it could. Rules, such as getting the full name of the subject of an article, are sometimes bent. Usually they’re bent for much more serious stories, and the top editors know who the person is even if the person isn’t fully identified in the article.

But in an article that is so “unimportant” in the broader scheme of things, meaning that it’s just a color piece and no one’s reputation is on the line if it were published, then I could see how it could happen. I’ve never worked anywhere where it would have (at least, not at the times I was there, given the overall attitude toward unnamed sources), but I can’t say that it wouldn’t ever happen.

And Templeton’s piece getting in the paper is only going to ennoble him. He totally has Whiting’s eye and ear now. He can push bigger and bigger pieces — and possibly lies — into print. It doesn’t matter that all of the city desk is suspicious of him. Newsrooms aren’t immune to office politics, by any means. As with anywhere else, if the big guy is bullish on someone, that person’s going to be somewhat protected (see Jayson Blair).

Gus knows he’s fighting a losing battle, though he refuses to give up just yet.

And just a couple of “they nailed it” tidbits that just made me chuckle:

• The scene where Gus wakes up in the middle of the night to call in to work because he thinks he got a couple of numbers wrong was spot on. I’ve done that before and pretty much every journalist I know has done that before. Like I said last week, we hate to be wrong. If we wake up in the middle of the night and think we got something wrong, it’s just gonna keep us up. If we’re lucky, it’s not too late to call and check.

• The scene where Gus and co. are out in the smoking area chatting about the demise of the “innocent bystander” and the plight of the “mother of four” — I’ve had that conversation, I think. Maybe not about those two in particular, but definitely their relatives.

Photos courtesy of HBO.