No, it's not an April Fools joke nor a New Year joke. Such a story would have been laughed out of the city in normal circumstances, but these, admittedly, are extraordinary times. The story of Bill Clinton's secret child has been around in the underground press for some time, but last weekend it surfaced on the gossipy cyberjournal Drudge Report, which spoke darkly of the White House being rocked by a ``new DNA terror.''

While the tabloid mongrels were still sniffing around the story, it fell upon the feisty rottweiler, the Murdoch-owned New York Post, to go to town with the latest scandal. New Yorkers woke up on Sunday morning to a banner Post headlinescreaming ``Clinton's Paternity Bombshell.''

According to the Post, certainly not the epitome of responsibility or rectitude, a 13-year-old Arkansas boy Danny Williams, whose African-American mother claims he was fathered during a paid sex encounter with Clinton has taken a DNA test to prove the paternity.

The DNA test was taken at the instance of the tabloid magazine Star, whose reporter Richard Goodling is working on the story, the Post said. The story was also put out on Drudge Report, which said Goodling was hoping to compare the Williams' DNA test result with results of Clinton's DNA test available from the Starr Report.

According to the Post story, the boy's mother, Bobbie Ann Williams, has claimed for years that she had bedded Clinton and her son was the result. Williams says she was a 24-year-old hooker in Little Rock Arkansas when she had sex with then Governor Clinton.

A story in a New York tabloid sourcing it to a supermarket sleazerag wouldn't even havebeen sniffed at but for a couple of factors: One, Richard Goodling, the Star tabloid's reporter, broke two stories that were both subsequently confirmed: He first reported Clinton's affair with Gennifer Flowers; and in 1996, he exposed Clinton advisor Dick Morris's dalliance with a prostitute.

In an additional twist, the story mirrors a similar yarn in the movie Primary Colours, supposedly a roman-a-clef of sorts on Clinton. In the movie, a presidential candidate (John Travolta as a Clinton lookalike) impregnates a young African-American girl. His cohorts buy the family's silence because the story surfaces during the campaign. Primary Colours was written by some-time Clinton pal Joe Klein.

But critics -- and there are still some sceptics in anything-goes Washington -- say the story is highly improbable, because if there was anything to it, Ken Starr would certainly have gotten under it.

Although the mainstream American media is not touching the story yet, it gathered enough momentumon Monday to figure at the White House briefing. Asked why the White House would not respond to the story instead of smearing a tabloid which had been proved correct before, spokesman Joe Lockhart said he would only comment if someone brought some ``independent reporting'' to him.

He then joked about the whole story.

Q: The picture (of the boy) on the Internet looks exactly like the President.

Lockhart: That's good. And I'm an alien space baby.

But the Drudge Report, which first broke the Monica Lewinsky story, said the latest scandal had thrown the White House into a blind chaos. ``It's a stained dress all over again. We've been here before,'' Drudge quoted ``a well-placed source'' as saying.

Williams apparently sold her story several years ago to the Globe tabloid but it was buried under an avalanche of tales from women who claimed to have bedded Clinton. It was not immediately clear why she came back with the story or why Star -- as opposed to Starr -- wasworking on it, but reports said the tabloid had sent Danny boy and his mother to a secret location pending results of the DNA tests.

If the tests turned positive, Star would arrange a massive media exposure, Drudge reported. The talks shows and latenighters were meanwhile feasting on the story. ``Only Bill Clinton can distract people from one sex scandal with another sex scandal,'' was the most popular line of the day.