Imedi, Georgia's third-most popular channel, broadcast the “news” of the Russian invasion on Saturday evening at 8pm, a time when many of the country's four million people would have been glued to their television sets before bedtime.

The news program opened with a breathless broadcaster cutting right to the chase, announcing that Russian troops were mobilizing on the border for an invasion, while the whereabouts of the president was apparently unknown.

“Good evening, this is a breaking news edition of The Chronicle,” the broadcast began. “In a few minutes, President Saakashvili is expected to make a special statement on the situation in the country. We don’t know if it’s going to be a recorded or a written message.”

First, it seems highly unlikely that any news channel would have the temerity to drag the nation’s supreme leader into an earth-shattering story – fabricated or not – without his having some wind of it beforehand. Furthermore, if the news report was capable of duping thousands of well-educated Georgians, surely it would be capable of duping just as many Georgian bureaucrats, some of them parading around in military uniform. Certainly, the management of Imedi is not so incompetent as to not have taken this fact into consideration. In other words, in order to prevent the Georgian military from heading for the hills, or the Georgian president fleeing from imaginary Russian fighter jets, some top-ranking individuals had to be in on the premature April fool’s joke.

So at this point, the dead-serious Imedi news anchor proceeded to drop the following bomb on living rooms across Georgia: “It’s been reported that Russian troops deployed at Lenigore… have been put on combat alert.”

In the media-staged conflict that ensues, the situation quickly deteriorates as President Saakashvili is killed, possibly by a poison-tipped silk tie (it’s fiction, so anything is possible), while opposition leader Nino Burdzhanadze, ex-Speaker of the Georgian Parliament, has taken over the Herculean task of ruling the besieged nation.

Incidentally, the news report gave no insight as to whether Burdzhanadze’s first task as president would be to get Georgian wine back onto Moscow’s store shelves, but we can always hope.

It should be remembered that Burdzhanadze, leader of the “Democratic Movement for United Georgia” party, was just in Moscow for a series of high-level meetings with Russian officials in an effort to normalize relations between the two countries. News of Georgia’s leading oppositionist politician cozying up to Kremlin officials went down as smoothly as Russian vodka in Tbilisi.

During his recent State of the Union Address, Saakashvili made a transparent remark concerning such “excursions,” saying “there will always be at least one rotten Georgian” who will be willing to open relations with the Kremlin. Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has declared the Georgian leader “persona non grata” in the Russian Federation.

Once it became clear that the bulletin was bogus, a large agitated crowd, together with members of the political opposition, gathered at Imedi headquarters condemning network officials and government officials for its support of the broadcast.

“It’s incredible stupidity. The entire city, the whole of Georgia is shocked – people are shocked!” said opposition member Petre Mamradze, “Hundreds of people rushed to ATMs, to gas stations, even to shops to buy bread…”

“It is an effort to create panic and to show that there are some problems in the country, but people should think about another problem, the possibility that tanks could come,”Nino Burdzhanadze told the crowd with the aid of a megaphone. “And also (to create a situation where) people will forget about our inadequate, irresponsible president who rules using dirty and black PR methods.”