America’s self-described “paper of record” admitted to a faux paux this week when it published a fraud letter submitted under the name of the Parisian mayor Bertrand Delanoe.

The letter was e-mailed to The New York Times criticizing the effort of Caroline Kennedy to seek Hillary Clinton’s vacant New York Senate seat.

“What title has Ms. Kennedy to pretend to Hillary Clinton’s seat? We French can only see a dynastic move of the vanishing Kennedy clan in the very country of the Bill of Rights. It is both surprising and appalling... Can we speak of American decline?,” the letter read in part.

It was spotted by an employee of a New York-based French language publication, France-Amerique.

Jean-Cosme Delaloye, editor-in-chief of France-Amerique, said the employee was skeptical given the language used: “When we read the letter it just sounded very surprising. When we called Paris to verify the information ... they were very surprised,” he stated to the AP.

Once the Paris Mayoral office confirmed that the letter was not in fact from the mayor, France-Amerique broke the story Monday that the Times letter was inauthentic. The Times issued an apology the next day.

“We have already expressed our regrets to Mr. Delanoe’s office and we are now doing the same to you, our readers,” the Tuesday morning Times editorial stated.

The Times editorial blamed the mistake at improper e-mail vetting. Usually editorial boards will edit letters and then submit it to the sender in order to get their permission to publish the edited letter. The Times did not, naturally, receive any replay from Delanoe’s office.

“In this case, our staff sent an edited version of the letter to the sender of the e-mail and did not hear back. At that point, we should have contacted Mr. Delanoe’s office to verify that he had, in fact, written to us. We did not do that. Without that verification, the letter should never have been printed,” the Times wrote.

How could the Times make such an amateur mistake? Can we speak of The New York Times’ decline?