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When you think of Fred Thompson, think not of him as the vaguely familiar former Hollywood character actor and present U.S. Senator from Tennessee. Instead, think of him as looking something like General Zod in Superman II, after Zod was banished to the Phantom Zone, and his face was pressed up againt this huge pane of glass that spiralled end-over-end through the galaxy. Because Fred Thompson does not fully exist on what we all call "Earth." No, Fred Thompson exists, more so than any man alive, in some purgatorial astral plane between the corporeal world -- what we refer to as "real life," as in "I heard Brad Pitt's stupid in real life" -- and the strange phantom zone that is celebrity. Why? Let's examine the evidence:

People's Exhibit A: In 1967, Fred Thompson graduates from Vanderbilt law school. In 1973 and 1974, Fred Thompson serves as a Minority Counsel to the Senate Watergate Committee.

People's Exhibit B: In 1977, Thompson helps expose a scandal in Tennessee that leads to the toppling of the governor. The scandal becomes the subject of a best-selling book and, later, a 1985 film called Marie, in which Fred Thompson plays himself.

People's Exhibit C: Fred Thompson parlays that role, in which he plays himself, into a part on Matlock, and then, later, into a successful HITG! career, using his hound dog jowls and no-nonsense Southern drawl to great effect in such thrillers as No Way Out, Fat Man and Little Boy, The Hunt for Red October, Die Hard 2, Class Action, Thunderheart, and In the Line of Fire, in which he almost invariably plays a lawyer, Senator, federal marshal, Head of the CIA or other such assorted law enforcement and/or government muckety-mucks.

People's Exhibit D: In, 1990, archival footage of the young Fred Thompson speaking at the Watergate hearings is included in Oliver Stone's JFK.

People's Exhibit E: In 1994, Fred Thompson is elected to the United States Senate.

All of which causes one to wonder: Is Fred Thompson now an actual U.S. Senator, or does he just play one on TV? Is Fred Thompson even real? Or did we, as a people, imagine him -- will him into being -- because we collectively, subconsciously, knew that what the world needs, right now, more than ever, is a man like Fred Thompson -- lawyer, actor, Senator, Renaissance Man?

Sure, there may be HITG!s more recognizable than Fred Thompson, more successful than Fred Thompson, even more essentially HITG!ish than Fred Thompson. But we'll bet dimes to donuts that Fred Thompson is the single most important Hey, It's That Personification of the Continual Blurring Between Reality and Our Mediated Experience of Same!

Yes, in that category, Fred Thompson -- like the cheese -- stands alone.