In the late '90s, private investigator Joe Culligan registered presidentbillclinton.com and other Clintonesque domain names as a joke. Now Bill Clinton's lawyer is pursuing legal action to get the website addresses. It's payback, says Culligan.

For months, Culligan has been digging into the mystery of why Maggie Williams, a longtime Clinton staffer who served as Hillary Clinton's campaign manager and now works for her as a Secretary of State recruiter, used Clinton's taxpayer-funded office to receive correspondence about stock options she received from Delta Financial, a subprime lender.

It's the most obscure imaginable charge. What, does Culligan think Clinton ripped off taxpayers by having a government-paid clerk drop the letter off at Williams's desk? It's hardly a scandal compared to the $1 million-a-year bill the government has paid since 2001 to fund Clinton's post-presidential operation.

It would have been a simple thing for the Clinton camp to brush off the charge as irrelevant. But the move to reclaim Clinton's domain names suggests that the charge has stung nonetheless. What is it about Williams's mailing address that has Clinton's lawyers so worried now — as opposed to any point in the past decade, during which time Culligan pointed presidentbillclinton.com, williamjclinton.com, and williamclinton.com as a gag to the Republican National Committee's website?

(Photo by AP)