Shepard Smith just cut off one of his correspondents at the knees, demanding after she conducted a live interview of the GOP's New Jersey gubernatorial candidate when she would give equal time to his Democratic rival. How awkward.

This is very strange. Smith threw to correspondent Shannon Bream, who conducted a live interview with GOP gubernatorial candidate Chris Christie in New Jersey. She asked Christie some fairly innocuous questions, and when she tossed back to Smith, he asked, "When will you be interviewing Jon Corzine?"—the governor of New Jersey and Christie's Democratic opponent. Grimacing, Bream replied, "We have multiple requests, and when it comes through, we'll let you know."

Then Smith went off the reservation: "Wow. I didn't know that was about to happen. My apologies for the lack of balance there. If I had had control, it wouldn't have happened."

We're not really sure what Smith is so exercised about. It's certainly not unheard of for news organizations to interview one political candidate without immediately turning to his opponent for a response, so for him to decide at that moment that an interview with Christie was unbalanced enough to merit an apology—as opposed to, say, everything that's ever been on Fox News, ever—is very strange.

Before throwing to Bream, Smith actually did get a little unbalanced himself, remarking off the cuff that it looked like, according to polls, Corzine is going to win. He may have been apologizing for that remark, although that doesn't explain how things would be different if he had "had control." The funny thing is, while Smith was offering his analysis of polls showing Christie dead in the water, this is what his graphic said: "NJ GOV CANDIDATES LOCKED IN DEAD HEAT."

We're starting to suspect that Smith has been given the go ahead to become the in-house leftie at Fox News, and that his ever-more-frequent outbursts are encouraged by Roger Ailes to provide cover to the whole organization, not to mention generate the sort of drama that gets written about on blogs.