Nicholas Plagman, of Atlanta, Ga., says he graduated from Birmingham-Southern College with a degree in biology, wishes to attend medical school or pursue a career in teaching or journalism.

This is all we know about the person who has embroiled Lewiston in turmoil.

Plagman posts writing on “associatedcontent.com,” which allows users to contribute, well, whatever they wish. His forte is embellishing legitimate news stories, allegedly to inject humor into what he perceives are farcical situations.

So, he took creative license with an article about the recent “hate incident” at Lewiston Middle School, where a student took a hunk of on-the-bone ham and used it to harass five Somali boys sitting around a lunch table.

Islam, like Judaism, declares pigs unclean, and forbids contact with the animal.

For a community seared by national spotlight for cultural friction, this incident was absolutely deplorable. School officials then took appropriate action, suspended the perpetrator, and considered the issue closed.

So did we. Until Plagman.

He concocted quotes attributed to Leon Levesque, Lewiston’s school superintendent, Stephen Wessler, of the Center for the Prevention of Hate Violence, and a Somali boy who spoke to the Sun Journal about the incident. Plagman also turned the hunk of honey ham, scoured from Easter dinner, into a ham sandwich.

His “article” quoted the Somali boy as equating the incident to dodging bullets in Somalia, Levesque saying “Ham is not a toy,” and Wessler calling the act worthy of a Nazi concentration camp.

The joke from Plagman’s pitiful satire is now on Lewiston. A national television program, Fox & Friends, glommed onto his screed as truth and mocked the city’s school department Tuesday morning, triggering an avalanche of hate mail, telephone calls, and other ignorant forms of communication to descend on the city.

They called from New York, California, Florida, Connecticut, Hawaii and elsewhere, rushing to spread bile into a community assaulted by hateful and childish writings, so eagerly spewed across the airwaves by a reckless program seemingly more interested in sensationalism than facts.

To see this incident victimized by idle bigotry of an Internet poster, then catapulted onto the national stage, opens wounds here that should stay closed. Lewiston is not a “poster child” for intolerance, racism, bigotry or prejudice, as others around the nation so easily brand us.

We have come far and, admittedly, still have far to go. Single incidents, like the ham, should not be considered isolated. They represent an undercurrent that still needs to be explored, to ease remaining tensions.

Fox & Friends is also a victim and needs to broadcast a retraction saying it was duped.

Plagman, however, is isolated – a single action by a wannabe writer trying to be funny, but coming off sadly bigoted, so unable to conjure clever words of his own that he’s forced to rewrite news stories as a foundation for a close-minded diatribe against a minority group.

If he’s got any guts, he’ll own up to what he’s done.

Lewiston deserves his apology.