Why did the chicken cross the road? To get to the other side.

This joke isn’t funny and neither was the one Massachusetts Senator John Kerry attempted to pull at Pasadena City College in California on Monday .

Kerry said: “You know, education, if you make the most of it, you study hard, you do your homework and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. If you don’t, you get stuck in Iraq.”

The botched joke implies students who aren’t smart will eventually end up in Iraq.

And thus began a firestorm of criticism from both sides of the aisle. But Kerry flubbed the joke’s delivery and soon after came out with a statement explaining how it was “was mangled in delivery.”

He actually meant to say: “I can’t overstress the importance of a great education. Do you know where you end up if you don’t study, if you aren’t smart, if you’re intellectually lazy? You end up getting us stuck in a war in Iraq,” meaning that if college students aren’t careful they’ll end up in the same position as President George W. Bush.

So the omission of one little word — “us” — was all Republicans needed to build up criticism against Democrats just days before the mid-term elections.

Republicans are notorious for latching on to a minor incident and riding it through an election, and the inappropriate response by politicians is no exception.

But if this is all Republicans have to criticize, then Democrats are in pretty good shape for the upcoming election.

While Kerry’s mistake was stupid, when voters look at his actual record, they will see he is adamant about protecting our armed forces. In fact, he has championed veterans’ rights since he returned from his tour of duty in Vietnam.

Furthermore, for Kerry to make such an inflammatory — and unfunny — joke on purpose would surely be political suicide. Clearly, it was a mistake.

Democrats who took his comments seriously have done a disservice to their party by not seeing Kerry’s comments for what they are: A slip of the tongue. If the tables were turned and a Republican lawmaker had made a blunder like this, all other Republicans would have either kept quite or towed the party line.

In an election year rife with important issues, Kerry’s guffaw amounts to little. We should laugh off his comment and accept the explanation that Kerry simply muddled his one-liner.