Baby Grace is not Maddie

It’s a sad, sad story — the discovery of the body of little girl in Galveston Bay dubbed “Baby Grace.”

But Lord, are some people stupid.

To back up: The child’s body was found last week in a storage box that washed ashore. The blonde child had been murdered — fractured skull — but nothing else was known about her.

She was two or three, had beautiful long hair, and was wearing a pink outfit with white light-up tennis shoes.

Your blood runs cold when you think about the monster who could harm that innocent soul and then throw her body into the bay in a box. This is why we have the death penalty.

Anyhow, authorities are trying to I.D. the child, so they put out a description and sketch of her and hoped that a good tip might come in.

Here’s where the Stupid Part comes in: A few people called to suggest that she might be Madeleine "Maddie" McCann, the 4-year-old British girl who was taken from a resort hotel in Portugal in May.

A very polite major with the Galveston County Sheriff’s Office said tactfully, “Based on the totality of the circumstances, we do not believe it’s her (Madeleine).”

What he should have said was, “Maddie disappeared in Portugal, which is a country on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, which is a large body of salty water, and to suggest that she somehow wound up in America six months later is "My Name is Earl" dumb.”

Apparently some folks couldn’t figure that out, and that’s scary. Even scarier is the fact that these folks are almost certainly eligible to drive cars, own guns and operate heavy machinery.

I hope I don’t run into one of them.

If you have a better idea about who Baby Grace could be, call the Galveston County sheriff’s Office at 409-766-2222 or the agency’s tip line at 866-248-8477.

Baby Grace deserves better. She deserves to have her name on her tombstone.

One more thing: Her killer needs to be named too.