Early on the morning of Aug. 25, several thousand Chapel Hillians woke up to find their copies of The Daily Tar Heel were wrapped in a spoof version of the front page, labeling itself as a "special anti-racist issue."

A lot of it dealt with the Youth for Western Civilization debacle from last spring, when a group of protesters silenced former U.S. Rep. Tom Tancredo, R-Colo., when he came to campus to speak about immigration issues, hosted by a new right-wing student organization. The next week, about a half-dozen people were arrested when another anti-immigration speaker, Virgil Goode, R-Va., came to speak.

Now, I've been told to just laugh it off. But while I certainly have bigger fish to fry, I can't quite simply let it go, for reasons both practical and ideological.

Even though the fonts were all wrong and the spoof was printed on different size paper than our regular paper, some students still mistook the "anti-racist" spoof as a true Daily Tar Heel product. That's troublesome, because the material in the spoof did not come close to matching our level of accuracy, reliability and fairness that our readers depend on.

If anything starts to erode that credibility, everything we do suffers.

Second, the actions are illegal. Ironically, earlier this year the N.C. Court of Appeals found in favor of The Rhino Times when members of the most racist group around, the Ku Klux Klan, wrapped the Times with its newsletter. The Rhino Times sued on grounds of unfair and deceptive trade practices, and was granted actual and punitive damages.

The third reason is the most personal for me. More than 50 of my closest friends worked for days to produce one of our largest issues of the year, and many students decided to pass it by because of the spoof.

We're all about free speech at The Daily Tar Heel. We run all sorts of letters, and I hold office hours to hear anybody's concerns. I would love to sit down with the people who feel so strongly that they will hand-wrap 3,000 issues of our paper.

But spoofing our paper the way they did just won't fly. It ends up hurting both of us.

Andrew Dunn is a resident of Apex and editor-in-chief of The Daily Tar Heel, the UNC student newspaper.