Karl Rove was absolutely stunned to discover that his deletion of emails resulted in their deletion, a lawyer for Rove said today. "Mr. Rove thought that his emails would still be there after he deleted them," the lawyer explained.

Mr. Rove spent many painful hours regretting the tragedy. "If he had hair, he would have pulled it out," said Robert Luskin, Rove's attorney. "He was fit to be tied."

"Those emails are now missing?!?" Rove reportedly said in astonishment yesterday. "But they were supposed to be preserved because of Federal law and a pending criminal investigation!!!!" Rove then demanded to know who the h___ deleted them and was "absolutely crestfallen" to learn that he had done so.

"I was just trying to tidy up my electronic desktop," he sobbed. Some who witnessed Rove's tantrum said that he then held his face in hands as he murmured, "The horror, the horror." Others said that Rove was saying, "Sanjaya, Sanjaya," apparently referring to a performer on American Idol, but that could not be confirmed.

Rove railed against the incompetence of administrators who failed to insure that a proper backup system had been kept, and apparently had to be restrained by trained paramedics when he subsequently discovered that over five million White House emails had also probably been destroyed. Onlookers initially thought that Rove may have been upset that more emails had not been "purposely mislaid," but Rove later made it clear that he was shell-shocked and saddened by the mistake.

"How could this Administration be so incompetent that it can't keep a copy of a single email?" he said. "We can't afford to make these kinds of mistakes. I mean, what if we had to go to war?"

Historically no member of government has been so distraught since a Nixon aide accidentally threw a briefcase containing important White House records relating to the Watergate scandal into a river.