WASHINGTON – Representative Michele Bachmann (R-MN), the most outspoken congressional member of the Tea Party, announced yesterday that she will not run for reelection in 2014, and confessed that her entire political career—stretching back to her days in the Minnesota State Senate—has been an elaborate piece of “satirical performance art.”

Bachmann explained that she’s spent the last twelve years testing the limits of American credulity. “Years ago, I set out to demonstrate how ridiculous the political world had become,” Bachmann said in a YouTube video announcing her plans to retire at the end of her fourth term. “I believe I have accomplished my goal. I’ve shown that a major American political party will embrace—nay, glorify—a woman dumb enough to say, on the House floor, that ‘there isn’t even one study that can be produced that shows that carbon dioxide is a harmful gas.’ I actually said those words, and instead of being laughed out of the room, I was reelected to Congress. Twice.”

The political world is reacting to Bachmann’s confession with shock and embarrassment, but the acting world is lauding her as “the greatest thespian of all time.” James Lipton, who has already booked Bachmann to appear on his hit interview show, Inside the Actor’s Studio, confessed that he too was taken in by the ruse. “I once heard Michele Bachmann, speaking about a trip to war-torn Iraq, compare her time in that country to visiting The Mall of America, because ‘there’s marble everywhere… there’s water everywhere.’ Anyone who can utter such nonsense, and do so without breaking character, is a true artist. Bravo, Michele!”

Bachmann says that even she never expected her performance to last this long. “I thought people would have caught on to it many years ago. Back in 2004, I said at an education conference that The Lion King was gay propaganda. When that little gem didn’t destroy my career, I realized I might be able to take this stupid act all the way to the top.”

“Fortunately, I was wrong,” Bachmann continued. “And thank God for that—can you imagine if I’d been elected president?”

Bachmann’s announcement has already had far-reaching consequences. The Republican National Committee has called an emergency meeting of top GOP politicians to “discuss how to proceed, now that [they’ve] tailored [their] entire platform around the ramblings of a fictional, satirical character,” and Politifact has laid off a third of its fact-checkers, saying that “without Bachmann in town, there’ll be significantly less work for us to do.”

Now that she’s revealed the true nature of her political career, Bachmann says she’s relieved and hopeful. “I hope that, in the end, I’ve done some good. I know that my votes—and the influence of my insane ‘ideas’ on the political culture at large—has and will continue to wreak havoc. But hopefully, the next time a politician says something like, ‘The very Founders that wrote those documents worked tirelessly until slavery was no more in the United States,’ the American people will stop and wonder, ‘Is this person for real?’”